Breaking through the Suwalki corridor and connecting Kaliningrad with Russia by land is a very old dream of the Kremlin
According to Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda, the forces of the so-called Wagner PMC are concentrated near the Belarusian city of Grodno, which is located in the northwest of the country.
At the same time, the number of mercenaries in Belarus already exceeds 4,000, and according to the Polish side, it may reach 10,000.
And the fact is that Grodno is located right at the beginning of the so-called Suwalki corridor, a 65 km long route along the Lithuanian-Polish border that separates the Kaliningrad region from the rest of Russia.
Since the 2010s, NATO has considered the breakthrough of this corridor by Russia to be one of the most likely scenarios of Kremlin aggression. And in Moscow, they actually started talking about it in the 1990s, when Kaliningrad was cut off.
At the same time, to counter this threat, the Alliance’s battalion tactical groups have been deployed in the area. But in this case, we are talking about battalion forces, as of 2022, a group of 800 US military personnel, and up to 1600 people from the armed forces of Germany, the Czech Republic, Norway, and the Netherlands.
To these forces, of course, we need to add brigades of the Lithuanian and Polish armed forces, as well as the overall contingent of NATO’s rapid reaction force in Europe. But the fact is that it is unlikely that the Wagnerites are preparing for full-scale hostilities.
It is in the Kremlin’s style to take gradual steps to escalate the situation, and therefore, we should expect some raids by mercenaries. At the same time, both in Poland and Lithuania. And the Suwalki corridor is also suitable for this, because the section near the border with Belarus runs through forests.
At the same time, any increase in the threat near NATO’s borders will naturally lead to a partial shift in the Alliance’s attention to a new problem. And this is exactly what the Kremlin is counting on. At the same time, the measurement of the West’s reaction has already begun, as evidenced by the violation of Polish airspace by Belarusian helicopters, which remained unanswered at all.
