Lithuania ambassador Darius Degutis on nation's relationship with Russia

Within seconds of meeting ambassador Darius Degutis, I came to understand many things about Lithuania. Like why they medal in basketball every Olympics. I am tall, but he towers like a spruce.

Degutis invited me in for coffee and zagareliai, crunchy pastries made from mountains of sugar and plenty of fat.

I asked about life in Lithuania. He mentioned how his country shares a border with a coercive, authoritarian bully; who has recently invaded another neighbour and has the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

That concentrated my mind.

Australia's taste of coercion has only been recent. For Lithuania, threats from the local stand-over-man started decades ago. After Lithuanian declared itself independent, Russia decided to change its mind by cutting off gas, oil, and electricity.

Listening to ambassador Degutis, it dawned on me: this tiny Baltic nation has big lessons for us Australians. Four by my count.

Until recently, Lithuania imported 100 per cent of its energy needs from Russia, from gas to electricity. It gave Russia a stranglehold.

Strategic alliances often begin with a personal relationship. Not long after the wall fell in Berlin, Degutis met two men from the Danish Chamber of Commerce. In time this opened new trade and energy sources. Its reliance on Russia dropped from 100 per cent dependence for energy, to zero.

David Uren, over the road from the Lithuanians at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, discovered that Australia is the most trade dependent of all the Five Eyes nations. The Lithuanians showed it is possible to shake dependency and stay free.

After Russia first invaded Ukraine in February 2014, Lithuania introduced conscription: nine months of service after leaving school.

Today, Lithuania has 22,000 warfighters on active service and 100,000 reservists. The ambassador, as pleased as a point guard making a slam dunk, said they achieved that in seven years. His nation's reserves are well trained, equipped, and - crucially - at the centre of their army.

Ambassadors do not tell their host countries what to do, but, since I am a reservist, I figured out the tip. Our reserve numbers are going backwards, just as we need to expand. Reservists do not deploy overseas as formed units, nor are they "trusted" with artillery, helicopters, or armoured vehicles. Could part of the recruitment and retention solution be to value our reserve soldiers, sailors and aircrew more?

Lithuanians understood early they can never match the military force of the Russians. To borrow a phrase from one strategist I admire, Brigadier Ian Langford, they knew they needed "to offset quantitative inferiority".

It took more than a decade of lobbying, but by 2005 the ambassador was organising the NATO summit in Vilnius.

The ambassador is all about working alliances, where each other's tank crews and soldiers can share orders and information; what is known as interoperability. In the last few weeks, they hosted Exercise Iron Wolf 22, a military exercise with heavy armour, warplanes and 3500 troops from 14 allies and partners. There's a permanent NATO presence of F-35s in the old garrison city of Siauliai. The ambassador said he'd like to see RAAF fighters there in the future.

Australia has been furiously building alliances for the strategic offset we need. The AUKUS alliance was a breakthrough. The Quad has great promise. The Five Power Defence Agreement could be stronger. As my boss in Denmark says, these alliances need to be active and interoperable, "otherwise it's just chit chat".

Whew. The coffee was finished, but the class in geopolitics came with a coda, about the power of memory.

Degutis told me about an old KGB building in Vilnius. It has been turned into a museum and the memories it holds: of the 150,000 Lithuanians exiled to the gulags by the Soviets; the 190,000 Jews killed during in the Nazi occupation; and the 80,000 killed in the years up to 1991, at least 1000 just in that old KGB building.

This, the ambassador explained, is how they know what Ukraine is going through, "because that's what we went through". It's also why this tiny country is one of the leading donors to Ukraine.

I wonder about us Australians. We feel, like the Midnight Oil song, "our country was never in flames". We've all but forgotten the death marches from the last time war came to our shores. To jolt us out of our amnesia, we need immigrants and ambassadors like Degutis. And we need to listen to them.

We need to recruit them into our national defence conversation. Because these are the people who have a sense of urgency. The Lithuanians did not wait until the bear stirred. They got ready 10 years before. In the minds of people I meet at the Australian War College, that is the point we are at now, though it could be much closer.