On Friday, Russian authorities retaliated against a newly unveiled NATO deterrent strategy that aims to consolidate the alliance’s ground reaction capabilities. The proposal has Moscow worried, especially about the vulnerabilities in its heavily fortified exclave, Kaliningrad.
The Kremlin was alerted when an official there said that Gen. Christopher Donahue’s deterrent policy was nothing more than “a plan to unleash World War III with a subsequent global standoff [and] no winners.”
Russian Parliamentary Committee on International Affairs chairman Leonid Slutsky warned that any aggression on the Kaliningrad area would be interpreted as an assault on Russia. He said that the country will take all necessary retaliatory actions, as outlined in its nuclear strategy, in an interview with the East 2 West media source.
After Donahue stated that the alliance can “take down” Kaliningrad using ground-based operations “in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than we’ve ever been able to do” while explaining the new capabilities being rolled out by the U.S. and NATO militaries, Slutsky continued by claiming that NATO is a “threat to global security and stability.”
U.S. General John Hyten unveiled the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line” plan at the first-ever LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, on Wednesday. It shows how NATO is reevaluating its defensive approach to counter Russia, the region’s main danger.
Based on lessons acquired during the conflict in Ukraine, the strategy aims to improve ground-based capabilities and exploit military-industrial interoperability, particularly in the Baltic area, to effectively fight and eliminate the danger presented by Russia.
Even if Donahue wasn’t implying any kind of direct danger to Kaliningrad, his remarks do show how vulnerable the area is to Moscow. Kaliningrad is totally shut off from mainland Russia and lies on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.
A narrow strip of territory that forms the boundary between Poland and Lithuania, the sparsely inhabited Suwalki Corridor (often called the Suwalki Gap) is once again in the spotlight. It’s less than 60 miles long.
Aside from being the sole direct route between Russia’s Kaliningrad and Belarus, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the narrow sliver of land also serves as a transportation corridor.
Putin’s gap is it. Peter Doran, an adjunct senior scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a specialist on Russia, told AWN Digital that it’s their lane. “Putin is keen on burying it. That must remain open.
“All eyes in the Baltic States are focused on a potential military threat in the next few years, whereby Russia would reconnect the land corridor to Kaliningrad,” said Doran. “That’s what has got a lot of people paying attention to Russia’s military force posture in the Baltic region.”
Russian leadership was aware of Donahue’s remarks on NATO’s enhanced capabilities in the Baltic area, and they underscored the considerable attention paid to the relatively tiny Russian territory.
“Kaliningrad is Russian territory, and such threats are essentially a declaration of war,” Sergei Muratov, a member of the Russian parliamentary committee on military and security, told the East 2 West source.
According to Muratov, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is quite “different conversation” compared to a full-scale war with NATO.