Geopolitics lightly frames the romance between Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in the 1951 Hollywood classic The African Queen. Signally missing from the film, set in East Africa during World War I, are Africans themselves: They feature in a patronizing vignette at the beginning and are then promptly marched away by the villainous Germans for forced labor. In real life, an estimated 300,000 of them died in the war between their rival colonial masters.

Anyone from the Baltic states or Poland may feel similarly written off in a new podcast series by the German newspaper Die Welt. Titled Ernstfall (roughly, “serious emergency”), the five episodes are based on a war game, set in October 2026, in which Russia attacks Lithuania, exposing—mild spoiler—disunity in NATO and indecision in Germany. The exercise was conducted on behalf of the Berlin-based newspaper by the German Wargaming Center at Bundeswehr University in Hamburg.

Geopolitics lightly frames the romance between Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in the 1951 Hollywood classic The African Queen. Signally missing from the film, set in East Africa during World War I, are Africans themselves: They feature in a patronizing vignette at the beginning and are then promptly marched away by the villainous Germans for forced labor. In real life, an estimated 300,000 of them died in the war between their rival colonial masters.

Anyone from the Baltic states or Poland may feel similarly written off in a new podcast series by the German newspaper Die Welt. Titled Ernstfall (roughly, “serious emergency”), the five episodes are based on a war game, set in October 2026, in which Russia attacks Lithuania, exposing—mild spoiler—disunity in NATO and indecision in Germany. The exercise was conducted on behalf of the Berlin-based newspaper by the German Wargaming Center at Bundeswehr University in Hamburg.

A team of 16 German and international bigwigs—retired officials, a sitting parliamentarian, and various experts—play the leading parts in a “Blue Team” and “Red Team,” representing Western decision-makers and their Russian counterparts, respectively. Other participants were not part of the on-site war game but dialed in to play bit parts in the podcast. They included figures representing NATO, the European Union, and the United States. Bartlomiej Kot, a Polish think-tanker, played his country’s prime minister. Though he has barely a minute of airtime in the five episodes, in the final moments of the podcast the scriptwriters do depict Poland as seizing the initiative from the dithering Germans, suggesting an armed airlift to Lithuania to push back against the Russian invaders. Whether its European allies back Warsaw is left as a cliffhanger.

The Lithuanians do not even get that consolation. Their country is not only invaded but also insulted, depicted by the podcast as defenseless and clueless: überrumpelt—“caught off guard” or “steamrolled,” which takes less than two minutes of Episode 2. Eitvydas Bajarunas, a former Lithuanian ambassador, described this as “undeserved ‘anti-advertising’” for his country.

In truth, Lithuania, like the other Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, would be no pushover. Its excellent foreign and military intelligence services are highly vigilant toward both the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad........

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