The Suwalki Gap is a small stretch of land along the Polish-Lithuanian border that separates Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave from Moscow’s Belarusian vassal state. It is also the only direct land connection between NATO’s Baltic “peninsula” (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) and the Atlantic Alliance’s continental European “mainland.”
To be sure, the Baltic trio are somewhat less geographically isolated with Finland now a NATO member and Sweden pacing impatiently in the alliance’s antechamber, but the Suwalki Gap undoubtedly remains a major strategic concern for NATO. Any attempt by Russia to take it would, depending on the route taken, be an act of war against Poland or Lithuania — or both. Poland and Lithuania are NATO members, meaning that such an attack would trigger the mutual defense arrangements under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, and, as such, would likely trigger a much wider war.
Under the circumstances, news reports that 100 of the mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group now based in Belarus are reportedly “headed towards” (whatever that may mean) the Suwalki region probably does not signify much other than Warsaw’s wish to signal that it is watching the border carefully, and that Moscow (via its Belarusian proxy) is either engaging in a little mischief-making or seeing what can be learned from Poland’s response. Or maybe the Wagner forces are just moving around Belarus, looking for a good time. There’s a lot to see in Grodno.
Belarus’s President Lukashenko hasn’t helped the mood by (CNN reports) joking that Wagner fighters had begun to stress him out as they wanted to go west on “an excursion.”
More from CNN:
More than 100 troops from the Russian mercenary group Wagner are moving towards a thin strip of land between Poland and Lithuania, Poland’s prime minister says, who warned they could pose as migrants to cross the border.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Saturday that his government had received information that the Wagner mercenaries were not far from Grodno, a city in western Belarus close to the land, which is also known as the Suwalki gap or corridor.
Thousands of Wagner troops are reportedly in Belarus following a failed military uprising in Russia.
Morawiecki repeated allegations that Belarus, a key ally to Russia, has been sending migrants westward in an attempt to overwhelm Polish border forces.
The troop movements, Morawiecki said, appeared to be another element in this campaign to destabilize the border.
“They will probably be disguised as Belarusian border guards and will help illegal immigrants to enter Polish territory, destabilize Poland, but they will also probably try to infiltrate Poland pretending to be illegal immigrants and this creates additional risks,” he said.
So far this year, there have been about 16,000 attempts by migrants to cross the border illegally, “pushed to Poland” by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Morawiecki said.
It is, of course, entirely possible that Wagner soldiers might either try to help illegal migrants or maybe even infiltrate themselves into Poland, but beyond (and this is not a small beyond) spying and/or sabotage, it’s hard to see how they could be used as 2014-style “little green men” once within NATO territory. What worked in Crimea or around Donetsk in 2014 worked, in part, because of an element of surprise and a degree of local support or indifference. That’s not how little green men would be greeted in Poland or Lithuania, and, with hybrid warfare much better understood now than nine years ago, their ability to surprise is likely to be confined to the when and where rather than the who.
Especially after the last month or so, Moscow has no plausible deniability when it comes to the activity of Wagner as an “independent” military contractor, even if (it’s unclear) that independence still exists, even nominally. That means that the consequences of Wagner activity in Poland or Lithuania could easily trigger Article 5 with all that that might lead to.