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Even after the newcomers, mostly drawn from 1 Battalion, Princess Patricias Canadian Light Infantry, are certified sometime in August as operationally effective, they will be allowed off base only on “supervised cultural days,” the commander, Lt.-Col. Wade Rutland, said after leading a live-fire exercise last week involving other NATO forces training in Latvia. Those excursions may include visits to museums, theatres, parks and restaurants.

But the centrepiece of the leisure activities will be hockey games against each other and against Latvian military and civilian teams at the four rinks near the base the Canadians will share with the Latvian army and a small number of soldiers from Albania, Italy, Spain, Slovenia and Poland.

“There will be no 48-hour weekend passes,” the colonel said, referring to the good old days during the Cold War when Canadians stood watch against the Red Army in Germany.

German troops in Lithuania have already been targeted twice by Russian propagandists through what has become known as “hybrid warfare.” Within days of their arrival emails claiming German troops had raped an underage Lithuanian girl were sent to a leading Lithuanian politician and reported on by local media outlets. Police investigated and concluded that there was no evidence at all to support such a claim. More recently a photo-shopped image of the German commander, Lt.-Col. Christoph Huber, appeared on a blog along with the fiction that he was a Russian spy who was “not loyal to NATO or to Lithuania, but is a strong supporter of Russian policy.”