While the conflict in Ukraine is mostly concentrated in the east along the country’s border with Russia, the borders of NATO members to Ukraine’s north and west are increasingly being tested. Mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group have moved into Belarus, and Russia has been striking Ukrainian port facilities on the left bank of the Danube, just across the river from Romania.
This week, I travelled by car from Warsaw to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, through the Suwalki Gap, the 100-kilometre-long border between NATO countries Poland and Lithuania that is sandwiched between Russian ally Belarus and Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea. The most direct route between the two cities goes through Grodno in Belarus, which would have made the trip 60 kilometres and 40 minutes shorter, but that route was closed due to increased tensions in the region. […]
While it’s extremely unlikely that Russia will directly attack NATO members, the edging of the Ukrainian conflict towards NATO borders raises other potential concerns. The first possibility is that some form of hybrid threat emerges along the Belarusian border, such as manufactured refugee flows or Wagner fighters, or otherwise unidentified ‘little green men’, breaching the border with activities that offer the Russian government plausible deniability. The other possibility is that missile or drone attacks aimed at Ukrainian territory cross over into NATO territory by mistake. Läs artikel