A tourist area in Augustow, Poland, not far from the borders with both Belarus and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. (Inset) A map showing the border of Poland. — ©️2023 The New York Times Company.
AFTER a day of kayaking recently along Poland’s northeastern border with Belarus, the chief editor of a news portal covering events in a strip of farmland and forest known as the Suwalki Gap watched the news in dismay as the Polish prime minister warned about Russian mercenary fighters advancing on the region from Belarus.
More than a month on, there is no sign of the mercenaries moving anywhere.
And the only real danger that the editor, Wojciech Drazba, sees comes from the “parallel world” of Polish leaders “spewing fear” about the Suwalki Gap as they pose as muscular defenders of Poland’s borders before a critical national election.
“The sun is shining, the scenery is beautiful and absolutely nothing is happening,” Drazba said late last month in Suwalki, the sleepy town that serves as the administrative centre of a border area that Polish state television, recycling overwrought foreign media reports, describes as the “most dangerous place on Earth”.
A view from Poland of the spot where its border intersects with those of Lithuania.
A supporter of neighbouring Ukraine in its efforts to resist Russian aggression, Poland has taken in millions of Ukrainian refugees and become a vital transit route for Western arms.
But its critical role as a lynchpin of the West’s military, humanitarian and diplomatic support for Ukraine has coexisted with a government agenda increasingly driven by domestic politics.
With Poland’s nationalist governing party, Law and Justice, facing a tough general election in October, residents of the Suwalki Gap have been bombarded with warnings by the government in Warsaw and the sprawling media apparatus it controls of the imminent danger posed by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and his loyal Belarusian ally, President Alexander Lukashenko.
On a visit to Suwalki last month, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki joined the president of neighbouring Lithuania, a fellow Nato member, to pore over military maps of the border region – and denounce Poland’s main opposition leader, Donald Tusk, as being soft on national security and for downplaying the threat posed by Russian mercenary fighters.
“These threats are real,” Morawiecki insisted, adding that the “Wagner group is extremely dangerous”.
A cross by a road that leads to the now closed border crossing to Belarus.
The response of most residents? Enough already.
“We all know that Putin is a sick man who is capable of anything,” said Miroslaw Karolczuk, the mayor of Augustow, a Polish resort town near Suwalki. But, he added, the constant talk of possible conflict “really gets on my nerves” because it frightens away visitors.
“Why is everyone talking about threats all the time? As you can see, there are no tanks on the streets or soldiers with automatic weapons,” he said.
The towns and lakeside villages in the Suwalki Gap, he added, are among “the safest places in the world”.
For Karol Przyborowski, the co-owner of a Suwalki real estate company, all the hyperbolic warnings smack of pre-election fearmongering. But, he lamented, they have had consequences beyond politics, unnerving potential property buyers from outside the region.
He said he tells them not to worry because Poland is part of Nato, which means that “if something happens here, it will be total war. Whether you are in Suwalki or Warsaw or New York will make no difference”.
A lake not far from the border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. — ©️2023 The New York Times Company.
Presenting itself as the only reliable guardian of national security, the Polish government announced last month it was sending thousands of additional troops into the Suwalki Gap, a 100km strip of Polish territory between Belarus and Kaliningrad, a heavily militarised Russian enclave to the northwest disconnected from the rest of Russia.
The gap, straddling Poland’s border with Lithuania, is not defined by natural features like rivers or mountains, but looms large in the fears of military pundits and analysts as a potentially dangerous geopolitical flashpoint.
The term “Suwalki Gap” was first coined in 2015 by Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who was then president of Estonia. He said he came up with it on the fly just before a meeting with the defence minister of Germany, whom he hoped to persuade of the need to station Nato troops in the Baltics.
Eager to impress on Germany the vulnerable position of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, he re-imagined a prominent fixture of Cold War fears, the “Fulda Gap” – a tank-friendly lowland corridor between East and West Germany through which Soviet troops could theoretically attack Nato – and transposed it on northeastern Europe as the Suwalki Gap.
The German defence minister at the time was Ursula von der Leyen, who is now president of the European Commission, and, Ilves recalled, “I don’t think she took me very seriously”.
But the Suwalki Gap took on a life of its own, becoming a fixture of geopolitical punditry and military calculation – a vulnerable chokepoint that Russia might seize to separate the Baltic states, all members of Nato since 2004, from the rest of the American-led military alliance.
In an essay published by the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, Ian Brzezinski, a former United States deputy assistant secretary of defence for Europe and Nato, urged that the military alliance conduct a military exercise in the Suwalki Gap to “demonstrate that Nato does not fear conflict with Russia”.
Karolczuk, the mayor of Augustow, fears the business impact of all this. One hotel recently received dozens of cancellations, and a fishing store run by a friend of the mayor lost a big client who said he was too afraid to visit.
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, Daniel Domoradzki, a lawyer who heads Active Masuria, a regional residents’ group, worried that “we might be next because we are so close to Kaliningrad”, and asked authorities to provide information about functioning bomb shelters in the Suwalki Gap. He received no answer.
He said his group’s main concern these days is improving bus services, not a coming war with Belarus and/or Russia, though “with a madman like Putin in power, you never know what could happen”.
Of one thing, however, he is certain: “I hate election campaigns. Politics used to be about exchanging arguments about real problems. Now it is just about playing on emotions.” — ©️2023 The New York Times Company
