Triple border between Kaliningrad (Russia), Lithuania and Poland.
The poster, in Russian territory, warns that entry is prohibited.Albert Garcia (EL PAÍS)
Aleksandra was barely eight years old when she learned at school that she didn't live in a part of Europe like any other.
"Then I did not understand why, but when I went to secondary school I began to realize that it was a problem, especially when I saw that Putin ruled in Russia and learned the history of the USSR," he says after 25 years of life in Suwalki, the city in northeastern Poland that gives its name to the fragile border corridor between his country and Lithuania which, in these days of war in neighboring Ukraine, not only worries the inhabitants of the area, but also NATO and the EU.
The "problem" of this European Achilles' heel is not the neighbourhood, but the neighbors.
The only land connection between the Baltic countries and the rest of NATO and the EU is 65 kilometers in a straight line crammed between the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (a former Prussian territory that was not a strategic problem during the Cold War, when it belonged to the USSR and Poland was in the Warsaw Pact), to the west, and a Belarus increasingly indistinguishable from the Kremlin, to the east.
Just the two countries that NATO expressly blamed for the aggression against Ukraine in the final communiqué of the summit held last Thursday in Brussels.
If the escalation with the West got out of control and Moscow dared to attack NATO and EU territory, Suwalki would be a logical first step from a military perspective.
The Lithuanian president himself, Gitanas Nauseda, mentioned this concern to the press at the last summit in Brussels: “We want the Suwalki corridor to be defended by both parties.
We want [NATO] to be adequately prepared for its possible cut by both sides."
Nauseda called for "more training camps, more money to spend on infrastructure to house many more troops and, most importantly, more military equipment," especially to form "an air defense umbrella."
The beauty of the place is, at the same time, a blessing and a curse for the defense of its inhabitants.
On either side of the border, a lake can be seen every few kilometers, almost all of them capped by a layer of ice.
A winter sun shines, but it is one of the coldest regions in Poland and the dozens of streams, thick pine forests and muddy roads from rain or melting ice would make a traditional invasion – with soldiers, armor and artillery – a pain. head
Lake in the vicinity of the Suwalki corridor.
Albert Garcia (THE COUNTRY)
The curse, on the other hand, is that there are only two highways - which run parallel from north to south - with at least one lane in each direction.
One is as deserted as the border guards watching over it are bored, while the other is swamped in mid-afternoon by a line of freight trucks.
It is where a road converges from the capital, Vilnius, and another from Klaipeda, the only port in the country, one of the few without ice in northern Europe and an important enclave for the transport of goods.
An artillery bombardment of both highways, and of the only railway in the area, would easily cut off land communications, limiting the sending of reinforcements to the Balts by helicopters and boats, right across a sea in which Moscow has great potential. naval.
The rest of the roads are narrow.
some unpaved and scattered with gabled roof houses.
When the sun goes down, the trill of the birds is heard more than the passage of vehicles.
Queue of trucks in Lithuania, at the entrance to the border with Poland. Albert Garcia (EL PAÍS)
At the westernmost end of the corridor, a monolith marks the triple border between Poland, Lithuania and Russia.
Between a large gray fence topped with barbed wire and a smaller green fence, a sign warns in Russian, English, Polish and Lithuanian: “Stop, this is a border of the Russian Federation.
No admittance".
Several messages warn of the importance of not stepping on Russian territory by mistake and some border guards warn anyone who gets too close by loudspeaker.
In 2018, the Center for European Policy Analysis, a
think tank
based in Washington, published a detailed analysis in which he described the Suwalki corridor as a place where "many NATO weaknesses converge" and explained that the defense strategy was based on the assumption that the soldiers , paramilitaries and local reservists, plus the few allied troops deployed, would manage to contain the attack enough for the allied forces to come with force and speed.
The problem, he added, was the "numerous conditionalities": that the Atlantic Alliance would not hesitate to apply Article 5 (which obliges the rest of the member countries to come to the defense of the attacked), that the espionage services would have alerted the attack, that the Russian troops would not achieve a lightning advance on the ground from which to sit down to negotiate the map of peace...
More information
Follow the last hour of the war in Ukraine
Four years later, and after a month of war in which the Kremlin has been forced to limit mainly Donbas due to the lack of progress against an inferior rival, one of the authors of the report, retired US Army Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, shows more optimistic.
“We are much better prepared now.
I think they would fail in the mission to cut it down, ”he says by phone.
"The place is vulnerable just because of how cramped it is, but in terms of readiness it's not the best in NATO."
Hodges argues that the terrain would make it “very difficult” for Moscow to introduce mobile forces and that Russia is showing in Ukraine a “surprising inability to carry out joint operations and a lack of logistical preparation”.
He also believes that Norway and Sweden would help, despite not being in NATO,
"The only thing that makes the situation more dangerous is that there are now Russian troops in Belarus," says Hodges.
There are 30,000 and, last February, a few days before the invasion of Ukraine, the government of Aleksandr Lukashenko announced that they would stay indefinitely, instead of returning after military maneuvers, as initially planned.
It is Moscow's largest military deployment on Belarusian territory since the end of the Cold War.
Once the war had begun, Lukashenko also organized a referendum to approve the end of the neutrality and non-nuclear state status that the country had had since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and sent a message to the West: "If you carry weapons nuclear weapons to Poland or Lithuania, to our borders, then I will go to Putin to take back the nuclear weapons that I gave up without conditions.”
Added to this is an ambiguous statement this month by Putin in support of the desire of Belarus, which lacks access to the sea, to have a “presence in the Baltic”, a busy route through which commercial containers pass.
A Lithuanian border guard carries out a control at a border crossing with Poland. Albert Garcia (EL PAÍS)
“Without the corridor, we would actually be an island.
And if you look at the balance of forces, it favors Russia,” says Tomas Jermalavicius, head of analysis at the International Center for Defense and Security, based in Tallinn, the Estonian capital.
Jermalavicius insists that blocking the corridor would no longer have "major energy security implications," a key issue because of connections with Moscow inherited from Soviet times.
The Balts have been in a race against time for years to reduce this dependency.
In 2014, Lithuania began to avoid the only gas pipeline - Russian - that reached its territory thanks to a liquefied natural gas terminal on a ship.
So far this year, the country has not even imported Russian gas anymore, Jermalavicius notes.
William Alberque, director of Strategy, Technology and Arms Control at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, admits that the border is "very vulnerable", but sees the Kremlin as little capable of moving troops to the area now.
“A year ago, he would have said that it would take between 72 and 96 hours to cut the corridor.
Many people are recalculating this, seeing the performance in Ukraine”, he adds.
In 2014 and 2015, war games from the RAND Corporation analysis center placed Russian forces outside Tallinn and Riga in, at most, 60 hours.
"I don't know if it's the biggest Achilles' heel, but it certainly is the largest concentration of military capabilities per square meter," he stresses.
And he stresses that one of Moscow's problems is that, "as the case of Ukraine has once again shown",
A recent video, which went viral on social networks, in which a retired Russian military commander explained with a map on state television how to block the corridor from Kaliningrad has not helped the calm.
Today, 40,000 military personnel operate in Europe under direct NATO command, with five allied aircraft carrier formations sailing in the Baltic and Mediterranean.
Combat units in Poland and the Baltics have doubled in size.
A woman does her shopping first thing in the morning at the municipal market in the Polish city of Suwalki.Albert Garcia (EL PAÍS)
Until 2014, there were no forces of other NATO members in the Baltic countries.
The Russian annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas led the Alliance to approve a few months later, at its summit in Wales, the reinforcement of air defense, surveillance and military exercises.
In 2016, four combat battalions with some 4,500 troops were deployed in Poland and the three Baltic states.
They are similar to the four in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria that were given the green light by the Alliance last Thursday.
They do not technically imply a permanent presence at the gates of Kaliningrad, but a rotating one that is being extended, so as not to violate the cooperation agreement with Moscow that it signed in 1997 and whose second paragraph sounds extemporaneous these days: "NATO and Russia do not consider themselves adversaries each other".
In 2017, NATO for the first time carried out military exercises focused on defending the Suwalki corridor.
That same year, Russia and Belarus exhibited military muscle with Zapad 2017, some opaque maneuvers that included a Kaliningrad that, Jermalavicius recalls, is "very militarized", with a powerful naval force and an air base.
It also houses Iskander missiles, which can carry a nuclear payload, although experts are divided on the presence of atomic weapons in the enclave.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said weeks ago that Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia would be Putin's next targets.
When speaking of the Balts, their notable Russophone minorities are often mentioned, such as those that Moscow came to rescue from a "genocide" in Donbas.
Aleksandra Kuczynka-Zronik, an expert on the Baltic countries and national minorities at the John Paul II Catholic University and the Central European Institute, both in the Polish city of Lublin, insists that they are not a Trojan horse and recalls that in Lithuania, for example, they only account for 6% of the population.
“These are very integrated communities that are not pro-Russian,” she notes.
Let's go back to the area and to Aleksandra in Suwalki (she prefers not to give her last name).
Here, vulnerability is no secret to be whispered as if Moscow didn't know about it.
On both the Polish and Lithuanian sides of the border, even the worst English speakers often know the expression “Suwalki gap”.
It is the term used by NATO to refer to the corridor, with a word that, in this context, means a security “crack”.
“Here we are more scared than in Krakow or Warsaw.
It's just that it's so close…” she says.
“You have Putin next door and Belarus on the other side.
And our history with Russia is very complicated.
Here even the children understand what is happening.
We Poles are very patriotic and we don't like Russia.
It reassures me a lot to know that we are in the EU and NATO, but I am young and I know that being in them is something important.
My grandmother, however, does not buy it and insists that the United States and the United Kingdom said they would help us in World War II and they did not.
Witold Liszkowski is the mayor of Punsk, a quiet Polish town three kilometers from the border where 75% of its 1,200 inhabitants are culturally Lithuanian.
“If the Russians separated us, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia would cease to exist.
We are connected not only geographically, but also in identity”, points out the mayor, who recalls that the European Commission stopped at the beginning of the month, due to the invasion of Ukraine, a cross-border partnership program that also included Russia, mainly in the construction of roads.
A schedule of the program for the period 2014-2020 hangs from a board next to him and it almost seems like a metaphor.
A woman outside her home in the Polish town of Punsk. Albert Garcia (EL PAÍS)
"The situation remains the same, but with Putin you never know, because overnight they became murderers," says Natalia, along with her boyfriend Patrick, both 17 years old.
The young Piotr Pietruszkiewicz, a logistics employee at the Lithuanian subsidiary of a transport company, confirms that day-to-day life in Punsk “has not changed much” since the war began, but it has “in the mental aspect”.
"You can't help but think about it," he notes.
Her father has a farm on the other side of the border, and —he confesses with a smile— his friends who use dating apps are not averse to
matches
on the other side of the border.
Patrick and Natalia, 17-year-old students, in Punsk. Albert Garcia (EL PAÍS)
Piotr Pietruszkiewicz, in Punsk.Albert Garcia (EL PAÍS)
Human trafficking is generally from the Lithuanian side to the Polish side.
They cross to buy because it is cheaper, even after losing a little in the change from euros to zlotys.
"On weekends I can serve about 200 Lithuanians a day," explains Paulina at the pharmacy where she works, located in a shopping center on the access to Suwalki from Lithuania.
In Kalvarija, a town of 5,000 inhabitants already on the Lithuanian side of the corridor, Karol enters a supermarket still wearing the kit from the soccer match he has just played.
There's a troop carrier in the parking lot.
“We try not to think too much about the possibility of being isolated, because if you don't you become paranoid.
But we are not afraid of Russia.
We are in NATO and only Poland could already with Belarus”, he affirms.
In front of the City Hall of the town of Lazdijai, also in Lithuania, an unusual detail is seen in other EU countries: along with the local, national and EU flags, the NATO flag flies.
In the central square there is an installation with the letters of the word freedom in Lithuanian decorated with the flag of Ukraine.
A few kilometers away is the old border fence between the then Soviet Republic of Lithuania and Poland.
It measures barely two meters and some parts are kept as souvenirs, with little bows in the colors of the Lithuanian flag.
The Lazdijai border crossing – the only one at the time – was the scene of a historic moment in 1990, on the anniversary of the secret Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement by which Nazi Germany and the USSR divided up territories such as Lithuania.
A crowd demonstrated peacefully with the slogan "Let's go back to Europe" to denounce the Soviet soldiers controlling access.
The many pine trees that surround the fence recall another symbolic fact that followed: in just four days in 2003, between the signing of the EU entry agreement and the referendum to confirm it, thousands were planted to highlight that,
Old fence that separated Lithuania and Poland. Albert Garcia (EL PAÍS)
A historical comparison sometimes slips into conversations here: West Berlin during the Cold War.
A territory surrounded by enemies (as would happen to the Balts without access to the corridor) whose population survived almost a year of land siege by the USSR in 1948 and 1949 thanks to tens of thousands of flights in the famous Allied airlift.
Closer than Berlin, about 300 kilometers from here, was another corridor more present in the history books: Danzig.
Its invasion by the Nazis in 1939 marked the start of World War II.
It divided the Weimar Republic of East Prussia, which was broken up after the war, with the city of Königsberg renamed Kaliningrad by the USSR.
It was the scene of one of the terrible expulsions of the German minority blessed at the Yalta Conference of 1945.
The tragic history of the area appears from time to time.
A monument "to the victims of Stalinist terror" recalls the death and disappearance of hundreds of members of clandestine anticommunist organizations in 1945. "They died for being Poles," reads a granite inscription accompanied by dozens of wooden crosses and an "oak papal”, grown from seeds consecrated by the Pole John Paul II.
You can still see 13 German bunkers from that time, while in Suwalki's Cemetery of the Seven Confessions the Jewish part (nearly a third of its population before World War II) is a large empty plain, interrupted only by a monument memorial formed with pieces of tombstones.
It was destroyed during the Nazi occupation and the thousands of Jewish residents who failed to flee were exterminated.
World War II bunker, in Bakalarzewo (Poland). Albert Garcia (EL PAÍS)
Follow all the international information on
and
, or in
our weekly newsletter
.
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
subscribe
I'm already a subscriber