Key Points and Summary – Russia’s war and Zapad-25 drills sharpen Baltic fears of a strike through the Suwałki Gap—the narrow corridor linking Poland to Lithuania and the rest of NATO’s Baltic members.
-To blunt that scenario, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are racing to rearm, pledging defense budgets of 5% of GDP by 2026.
-Lithuania will host a permanently stationed German brigade.
-All three are building a “Baltic Defence Line” of bunkers, sensors and anti-tank obstacles and have exited the Ottawa Treaty to enable defensive minefields.
-Poland is adding a €2.5 billion “East Shield” along Belarus and Kaliningrad. The goal: shorten decisions, harden terrain, and deny Russia a quick fait accompli.
How The Baltic States Might Prepare for War
WARSAW, POLAND – At one of the Warsaw Security Forum (WSF) European defence and security conferences a few years ago, a Baltic nation’s defense officials speaking on one of the panels said it plainly:
“Where we are in the Baltics – sitting on Russia’s doorstep – we learned long ago to sleep with one eye open.”
Russia’s war in Ukraine has forced the Baltic states to prepare for what was once unthinkable: a direct military confrontation with Moscow on NATO soil.
The central and most likely scenario that they focus on is the Suwałki Gap.
This geographic corridor is a narrow stretch of territory between Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
It is also the only land bridge between NATO member Poland and NATO Baltic state member Lithuania.
MiG-31 Flying High Russian Air Force. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The assumption is that Russia would use the territory of its puppet state ally Belarus to invade this section of Poland’s border, cutting the alliance’s only link to the Baltics.
Military planners assess that this would be the focal point of any move by Moscow against the alliance.
It is, as more than one military analyst has assessed, “NATO’s soft underbelly.”
“If Russian forces were to seize the Suwałki Gap – Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia would effectively be cut off from reinforcements from other European NATO members,” said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former head of the European Command in Stuttgart, to a Brussels-based EU publication.
The Spectre of Zapad-25
This geopolitical vulnerability of NATO was magnified by the past week’s Zapad-25 joint Russian-Belarusian military exercises.
The name for these simulated combat drills literally means “Exercise West,” the same name given to these maneuvers in 2017 and 2021, and shows that the aim of the entire activity is to prepare for an attack on NATO.
Russia had been running these military exercises every four years since the 1980s, with a ten-year gap between 1999 and 2009. But the more recent outings have all seen a renewed focus on the Suwalki Gap invasion scenario.
Su-27 Flanker Fighter. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
There is also a precedent of Russia re-purposing what were once exercises as a prelude to an invasion of one of its neighbors.
The Zapad-21 exercise saw a significant number of Russian troops enter Belarus for the event, but then remain afterwards.
As such, they were an integral part of Russia’s pre-invasion planning.
Zapad-21 was a critical part of Russia’s strategic and logistical preparations in this regard. Its role as a smokescreen for the invasion of Ukraine has been well-documented by military and intelligence analysts.
How The Baltics are Preparing for the Worst
Taking no chances and doing their best to prepare for the worst, the Baltic states are rearming “at speed” – a phrase that we military officials often use.
Their common complaint is that NATO allies are unable to take action or make decisions “at speed” which negates a good deal of the alliance’s ability to act as a deterrent to Russia.
In the meantime, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have all pledged to increase their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2026. This would be well ahead of the 2035 deadline for reaching this level of national spending agreed to at the most recent NATO summit.
This increase will make the Baltics some of the top-level spenders on defense spending among all the European NATO members.
That also means additional billions that will be spent on new procurement for artillery, drones, air defense, and troop readiness programs.
Lithuania is also hosting a permanently stationed German brigade on the ground in their country. This is the Bundeswehr’s first long-term expeditionary deployment since World War II. The deployment, almost unheard of for the German armed forces, is what Lithuania’s Vice Minister of Defense, Tomas Godliauskas, has labeled a “collective defense approach” for the eastern flank of NATO.
A UK Typhoon flies above the Baltics on 25 May 2022. Image Credit: NATO.
The three countries are also pouring funding into fixed fortifications. In January, the creation of the “Baltic Defence Line” was announced.
This is, in fact, an extensive network of bunkers, anti-tank obstacles, surveillance systems, and supply depots.
In parallel, all three nations have also withdrawn from the Ottawa Treaty.
This will permit them to make extensive use of anti-personnel mines on their national territory, a use of these mines that the treaty had outlawed. Political and defense officials in Vilnius and Tallinn have defended the decision to exit the treaty as “logical and necessary” given the actions of Russia and its allies from North Korea, China, and Iran.
Poland is also investing €2.5 billion in the “East Shield” programme, which is a wide-scale construction plan to reinforce the borders it shares with Belarus and Kaliningrad with new surveillance towers, drones, border crossing and illegal entry detection systems, and also constructing layers of anti-vehicle and anti-tank barriers.
Polish and Baltic officials state that they are going to be prepared for any move that Russia might make to try to separate them from one another and to occupy the Suwałki Gap.
“We will not be caught out by surprise or unprepared,” said a Baltic defense official who spoke to National Security Journal.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
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Jim
September 19, 2025 at 5:40 pm
It’s fine the Baltics are exercising military exercises. Marshall spirit puts a quickness to your steps.
Russia understands the Baltics and the Baltics understand Russia.
Given the history which everybody knows, the Baltics are sensitive to any shifting of sands.
Actually, the sands aren’t shifting, in their neck of the woods, but that’s how sensitive they are.
It’s Poland where the sands are really shifting, polish officials have reported the one missile among the dummy drones, most made out of styrofoam & plastic with no warheads, fell on the house, the one damaged structure in the whole caper, from a Polish F-16.
That’s where the rubber meets the road. It says, okay, this little false flag (from Ukraine) didn’t go anywhere.
And, the Polish People are waking up to the kind of people these Banderites from Kiev are. And, they remember how Banderites slaughtered Poles at the end of World War Two.
And, maybe more important, see how Banderites behave within their midst and they don’t like it. Arrogant, insisting on terms outside their paygrade. Trying to cop a deal with an obvious edge towards them, saying you owe us, give it to us now. Trying to ripoff Poles at every opportunity, as if it’s the natural order of things.
The Poles are starting to wake up and smell the coffee.
These Banderites are no good and they’ll use you or take advantage of you if you give them half the chance.
The dam is starting to burst, politically, and at the front… anybody who deals with Kievians knows to hold on to his wallet.
Things are starting to come into focus.
I wish the Baltics well, but stay out of this fight… it’s not yours or Europe’s… it’s the Banderites and their pathetic lackey’s in Europe and beyond, here in the States.
Poland doesn’t want war against Russia… Banderites do… and, they’ll take you for a ride if you let them.
Swamplaw Yankee
September 21, 2025 at 2:31 am
The Bandera Family emigrated legally to the WEST. Many in the WEST had a chance to meet them as I did. Hmmm. The threat is in Komradde zzhhhimmmzz fear: it may spread. The days of the terrorist empire of imperial Muscovy is faded out.
The Free nations of POST Russia are speaking out. Visit their forum and meet millions of Bandera thinkers, all thinking POST Russian terrorist empire.
The POLISH will want to chat with Kommrade zzzhhimmm about the Genocide of Katyn. The chat line-up just goes on.
The Ukrainians will want to chat with the whole ethnic “NORMAL” Russkies about the 1932-33 20,000,000 ? starvation Victims, called the HOLODOMOR.
The Baltic nations have their many historic realities that the ethnic “NORMAL” ruusskies must address.
Compensation and reparation are two words that the Genocide loving ruusskie ethnic tribe avoids. Wait till that rubber meets the ruusskie ass on the road.
The ruusskie ethnic orc violently prays that compensation and reparations will be just like the cash the Armenians, Pontic Greeks, etc., received from the invading muslims deviants. That is zero, zip cash, as the WEST’s MSM shuts down whenever the genocide at Smyrna ( 1922) etc, etc, are mentioned about/to muslims in illegally occupied lands.
The international tragedy is that there is no international leader of the WEST. MAGA POTUS Trump has self-declared his abdication of this tangible post as his incapability is shown by Trump on a daily basis.
Trump is unqualified to adjudicate on giving away that which is not his to give. AS POTUS Obama in 2014 unilaterally greenlit the geopolitical loss to NATO of the Ukraine’s Crimean soil, families and Black/Azov Sea jurisdictional zones to the WEST’s prime evil cold war enemy, tsarling Putin!
That the USA caused in 2014 and still fuels in 2025 the Genocide of Ukrainians is a international appeal that the USA is zero qualified to any sort of adjudication on the temporary illegal occupation of Ukrainian soil.
Every Baltic citizen knows that the ruusskie ethnic thieves who moved into the vacant homes and farms of the 1932-33 20,000,000 HOLODOMOR victims have russkie grandchildren motivated, genetically driven, ready to butcher every Baltic alive and move into their homes and farms in 2025 ruusskie orc FREE real estate style. -30-
Jim
September 21, 2025 at 3:20 pm
Well, that’s right Stepan Bandera did find himself in the West after the war, a lot of blind eyes were turned after the war. In 1959, Bandera was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich, West Germany.
I don’t approve of assassinations, it degrades & corrodes international relations and is extra-judicial in the extremis.
But Stepan Bandera’s record at the end of World War Two was clear. And, the Soviets suffered a Bandera, mini civil war, after the End of WWII, which most Americans know nothing about.
Back to assassinations… Did the assassination of Stepan Bandera solve the problem?… apparently not.
Because the Bandera ideology of hyper-chauvinism lives & breaths to this day in Kiev.
Bandera came out of extremism… so-called “Ukrainians” were made the jailers to Southern Russia after the Russian Civil War, the Reds against the Whites.
The Reds won… the Bolsheviks… Vladimir Lenin dictated Novorossiya, heart of White resistance, (and where market economics were most successful) wouldn’t even get a Soviet in their own name and had jailers appointed which hated Russians in general, and would be under administrative jurisdiction by an essentially foreign people from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire… that’s where these so-called “Ukrainians” came from.
What a historical mistake… but it seemed to make sense in the aftermath of the Red-White Civil War.
“Ukrainianism” was a useful tool for the Bolsheviks and “Uks” were eager to use the brutality the Bolsheviks were famous for against their own supposed people.
The Banderites still operate that way today, nothing has changed.
Beyond grotesque… good riddance… to the dust bin of history.
Swamplaw Yankee
September 26, 2025 at 2:49 am
So, the days have passed and zip, zero response to the above tripe.
Check freenationarf.org/en – now or asap.
It is the forum of the Free Nations of POST RUSSIA. They just had an international Forum. Read the Agenda + copy it to your files. For the Yankee reader, it is educational.
The Kremlin Imperialism of Muscovy is shown for its many centuries of silencing, dispossession + forced assimilation under Muscovy’s Terrorist empire. The current cognitive trends are in the analysis of a POST RUSSIA world. That is, there is no Federation scam in existence.
There would be a republic of Sakha. Karelians, Kalyks, Erzya, Komi, Bashkirs, et al, have a concept that they will be finally free from the ethnic ruusskie peasantry. They seem to have had enough of the NAZI-like FSB. Putin has just supplied his NAZI-like FSB with heavy armour, like tanks, to be able to break and/or control the armed force structure.
Kommrade zzhhimmm seems to slip back to the Lenis era. The Ukraine was an independent country and not associated with the mongolized muscovy ethnics. The President, Petlura, was not some construct of crazed Halloween costumed in KGB get out, ethnic russians trapped in their 1000 year old genetic need to genocide of Ukrainians.
Again, the Ukrainian Orlyk, prepared the world’s first written constitution in 1710. Copies still exist and one wonders how the Yankee colonists copied the same Ukrainian concepts a few years later. Why? As military leader of Ukraine, Hetman Orlyk had enough of centuries of sex/slave trade of Ukrainian children by ethnic Muscovy russians.
Hmmm. No Muscovy constitution was ever needed in that fascist state.
In 1616, Ukrainian father successfully fought to state the russkie sex/slave mass abductors of Christian Ukrainian children. Yep, a 1000 years of ruusskie genocide and it did not start with that Hallowwen ghoul Lenin. -30-