NewsTracker Answers for week of Aug. 18, 2025

Q: Bordering Russia and its ally Belarus, NATO member Lithuania plans to teach thousands of its people, including schoolchildren, to build and pilot drones in a move to “expand civil resistance training.” Where is Lithuania, the southernmost of the three small Baltic States?

Circle the area on this map


Q: Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are on the Baltic Sea and were once ruled by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Lithuania borders Russia to the ...

A. North

B. East and south

C. South

D. South and west


D. The Russian semi-exclave of Kaliningrad is south and west of Lithuania. Kaliningrad is cut off by land from the rest of Russia’s territory. It is mostly surrounded by Lithuania and southern neighbor Poland. Like Lithuania, Kaliningrad borders the Baltic Sea to the west. Latvia is Lithuania’s northern neighbor, and Estonia is the northernmost.


Q: The drone training program comes after the unmanned aircraft became widely used in the Russian-Ukraine war. How have the Baltic States responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

A. Doubled military spending

B. Cut off Russian power grid

C. Began building defenses

D. All of the above


D. The Baltic States and Poland are building bunkers and anti-tank defenses along their borders with Russia and Belarus. Estonia and Poland now spend bigger shares of their national wealth on defense than the United States. The Baltic States recently connected their electrical grid to their NATO military allies instead of Russia.


Q: NATO nations bordering Russia and Belarus worry that Russian President Vladimir Putin may target them when the conflict in Ukraine ends. When did Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia declare independence from the Soviet Union?

A. 1985

B. 1990

C. 1995

D. 2000


B. In March 1990, Lithuania became the first country to declare full independence from the Soviet Union. Latvia and Estonia followed the next May. It wasn’t until the Soviet Union officially dissolved in December 1991 that 12 other nations – including Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine – were formed from the former USSR.


Q: Putin called the collapse of the Soviet empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” The collapse came at the end of which war?

A. Cold War

B. Crimean War

C. Hungarian Revolution

D. Winter War


A. What was called the "Cold War" ended with the Soviet breakup. The war was an intense rivalry between the United States and the USSR that began after World War II and included many proxy wars around the world. A former Lithuanian defense official said Putin invaded Ukraine because the former Soviet spy “cannot accept having lost the Cold War.”