Putin has his eye on the Suwalki Gap

The cavalry is coming. But not to Ukraine.

The US 2^nd Cavalry Regiment is moving to Romania, 1,700 US soldiers from the 82^nd Airborne Division are en route to Poland, as are 350 UK troops, with more on standby to go to Estonia. Four Danish F-16 fighter jets have gone to Lithuania, and 10 Spanish Eurofighter planes are expected in Bulgaria shortly. This is not to defend Ukraine, a country NATO will help but has no intention of fighting for. The re-enforcements are about signalling to Vladimir Putin’s Russia that any subsequent moves which threaten a NATO member will be met with force. 

The three Baltic states are thought to be the ones most in potential danger due to their location and the Suwalki Gap. This 90km-long corridor takes its name from a Polish town and lies along the Polish/Lithuanian border. At one end, on the Baltic Sea coast, is the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, and at the other is Belarus. In this century the Suwalki Gap has often been regarded as an old fashioned 20th century concept, but if you were paying attention it was clear it never went out of fashion. What has set the alarm bells ringing is the current joint military exercises between Russia and Belarus in Ukraine.

If President Putin intends to invade Ukraine, the 30,000 or so troops in Belarus can drive south and arrive behind Kiev as a larger force heads towards it from the east. But they give him another option as well – one for the future.

The current situation makes it quite possible that tens of thousands of Russian troops will be permanently stationed in Belarus. This puts them in a perfect position for a lightning strike across Lithuania to link up with the tens of thousands of Russian troops already in Kaliningrad and thus close the Suwalki Gap.

At this point they have cut all three Baltic States off from the rest of NATO. In this scenario Estonia and Latvia will have been invaded via their land borders with Russia. If NATO will not allow this to stand, it then has to fight its way through one Russian army just to get into Lithuania, and then head up to the other two allies to meet more Russian forces. Closing the gap also means Russia would have a contiguous military border stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

It would also put Russian soldiers on the Polish border again. At the moment the 1st Guards Army sits inside Russia, near the Belarus border, guarding the Smolensk Gate. This is a 50-mile-wide territory between the Dzwina and Dnieper river systems that for centuries has channelled armies through it – in both directions. It lies just 300 miles from Moscow. The Guards has more offensive equipment than NATO members Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Baltic states combined, and have conducted simulated invasions of Poland. Closing the Gap would give it the freedom to advance forward towards Poland.

This is why the Lithuanian President, Gitanas Nauseda, says the Baltic countries (and Eastern Europe) are facing their “most dangerous situation since regaining independence” in 1990, and has called for NATO reinforcements.

More likely than the above scenarios is Putin attempting to stay below NATO’s Article 5 threshold (an attack on one member is an attack on all). Undermining the Baltics from within is a less risky tactic. About 27% of Latvians, 25% of Estonians and 6% of Lithuanians are Russian speakers and most live in large concentrations in the border regions. It would not be difficult to create tensions within the communities.

His Chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, is a great believer in hybrid warfare. By this he means “military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special-operations forces. The open use of forces – often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis regulation – is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict”.

We saw that “certain stage” when Putin’s “little green men” took over Crimea in 2014. We may see it again in Ukraine soon. It’s a tactic well suited to the Baltic States which were once part of the USSR which Putin has said was “simply Russia under a different name”.

Faced with that sort of thinking, and historical precedent, most of the NATO countries believe they need to show resolve in order to prevent a Suwalki Gap/Smolensk Gate scenario emerging from whatever comes next. Mind the gap.