Poland-Belarus Border Tensions and Putin’s Baltic Dilemma
“You must always expand towards the Baltic and the Black Sea” – Tsar Peter the Great
The above quote is taken from the supposed Will of Tsar Peter the Great which many regard as a forgery. Nevertheless, it is quite an accurate summary of a core principle that has guided Russian foreign policy for the last few centuries. Moscow has always been acutely aware of its one great weakness, its location. With waters to the north that are frozen for part of the year and an eastern region that is too far from the industrial heartlands to be useful, the Eurasian power has always relied on the Baltic and the Black sea for trade routes and power projection. In particular, it needs access to warm sea ports, which are not frozen at any point in the year, and can be used to project naval might. As such, the country currently lacks direct land access to a contiguous and warm Baltic Sea port.
Russia does, however, have Kaliningrad which is an enclave bordering Poland to the south and Lithuania and Latvia to the east and west. This enclave was formerly part of Prussia and was annexed by Stalin in the aftermath of World War 2 due to its geo-strategic importance. The predominantly German population was ejected and Russians were bought in to change the character of the area. After the Cold War, the region developed a special Hong Kong like status in that it became a low tax haven designed to attract investment and take advantage of its unique location in the heart of Europe. In more recent years, the area has become heavily militarised with naval assets, hyper-sonic missiles and even nuclear weapons that can target European capitals.
The faltering nature of the military campaign in Ukraine, combined with Sweden and Finland joining NATO, have put Kaliningrad in a somewhat precarious position, at least from the point of view of geo-strategic planners in Moscow. It is now surrounded by NATO members on all sides and cannot be effectively operationalised in the event of a war. This is compounded by the fact that Russia does not have direct land access to the region. Furthermore, Putin is currently failing to connect Russian occupied land in Ukraine to Transnistria, a disputed region of Moldova that already has 1500 Russian troops and offers control to the mouth of the Danube and, thus, the ability to choke a vital Central European trade route.
Kaliningrad and Belarus are currently separated by what is known as the Suwalki gap which is 96 kilometres long and sits in Poland. In my view, and in the view of many geo-political analysts, Putin has every intention of creating a land route in the Suwalki gap in order to connect Kaliningrad to Russia and to disconnect the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from the rest of Europe. However, in order to achieve this goal he needs to take de-facto control of Belarus in the first instance and create a pretext for a military incursion into what is NATO territory without triggering a full scale war.
In the aftermath of Prigozhin’s doomed march to Moscow, the Wagner Group leader and 10,000 of his fighters were relocated to Belarus, ostensibly to train local soldiers. On the 29th of July, the Polish PM warned that Wagner fighters were moving closer to the border in a menacing move which is likely designed to provoke a response. On the 1st of August, Poland rushed troops to the border after Belarusian helicopters violated Polish airspace. These recent border tensions follow an odd statement issued by Putin on the 22nd of July in which he claimed that Poland was planning to attack Belarus and that he intended to defend his closest ally at all costs.
A widely reported, and supposedly leaked, Russian document from 2021, claims that Russia plans to fully absorb Belarus by 2030. If this document is authentic, it was written before the invasion of Ukraine and, thus, the timeline was likely predicated on a successful and quick campaign that captures Kiev in days. With the campaign not going according to plan, it is possible that the timeline has been bought forward in anticipation of a failure to capture Ukrainian Black sea ports, such as Odessa which acts as a major export hub for Ukrainian agricultural products. Furthermore, with Sweden and Finland joining NATO, Russia’s more northern Baltic Sea ports are less strategically significant in the event of a war since they can now be subject to a naval blockade, making Kaliningrad an even more vital chess piece.
Given Putin’s Baltic dilemma, the above would make a great deal of geo-strategic sense since if Putin can station troops on both sides of the Suwalki gap, controlling the area and creating a land route would be much easier. Border provocations with Poland could also be used as a pretext to station a large number of Russian troops and military assets in Belarus in anticipation of full absorption and, thus, Putin would have achieved his goal of direct access to a Baltic warm sea port whilst geographically isolating the Baltic States.
Nuclear weapons have already been moved to Belarus in what some view as a warning to NATO. It is possible that Putin thinks he can create a pretext for what will effectively be an attempt to annex a region of a NATO member in Poland, by claiming that Warsaw is threatening Minsk. It is also possible that this annexation would be led by Wagner fighters, giving Moscow a tenuous degree of separation and implausible deniability. However, taking the Suwalki gap without triggering a NATO response is no easy feat, especially since the Atlantic alliance has already conducted military exercises in preparation to protect the region.
Regardless of what Tsar Peter the Great really said, it is quite clear that Putin is moving in a direction that is in tune with the sentiment expressed in the Will, just as Stalin and other Russian leaders before him did. He is hell-bent on control of, and access to, Baltic and the Black Sea ports with his western and southern neighbours bearing the brunt of this aggressive expansion. Border tensions and brinkmanship with Poland via Belarus form part of the Putin grand strategy but these developments are also taking place at a time when Russia is getting militarily and politically more isolated.
Overly ambitious, yet not sufficiently competent, leaders have always been a weakness for world powers, especially those that are more authoritarian. Putin seems to be over-extending at a time when he is losing allies and overseeing a depleted military that is becoming increasingly dependent on reluctant reservists, second-rate imported military hardware and the somewhat unpredictable Wagner Group. His ambitions are too grand for the chess pieces he still had on the board, and in my view an unexpected check mate awaits.