“There’s nothing to be concerned about just yet" Irek Dorozanski/Polish Ministry of National Defence/Getty Images
![](https://staging.unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Blue-thumbnail-man-4-150x150.jpg)
“Outside a war zone, Suwalki is probably the most heavily armed region in the world,” the Polish anarchist explained. I had just told him I was travelling there; he responded with a grimace. The Suwalki Gap — a 100km stretch of land between Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and the tiny Russian maritime exclave of the Kaliningrad Oblast — has been dubbed “the most dangerous place on earth”.
If a shooting war between Nato and Russia were ever to break out, it is highly likely it will be here. The Gap provides the only rail and gas pipeline land routes between the EU and the three Nato Baltic States, leaving them vulnerable to Russian aggression. Yet it also gives Nato the opportunity to prevent Putin from accessing Kaliningrad, the only Russian port on the Baltic Sea that doesn’t freeze over in winter. The isolated city is home to 15,000 troops, a collection of Iskander missiles, and a purported flow of illegal weapons out to the EU.
This is not the first time tensions in the Suwalki Gap have caused alarm. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Russian troops carried out aggressive military exercises across the region, cementing its reputation as Nato’s Achilles’s heel. But the situation might escalate further: in June, Lithuania began enforcing EU sanctions on Russian iron, steel and luxury goods being transported to Kaliningrad. A Kremlin official retaliated by threatening “serious” consequences for Lithuania; not long after, the Lithuanian government was hit by a wave of cyberattacks and bomb threats. In response, the EU Commission last month withdrew sanctions on goods, except weapons, moving between Russia and Kaliningrad.
On leaving the train station in the Polish town of Suwalki, from which the Gap takes its name, one of the first things I saw was a giant billboard across the road, exclaiming in Russian: “Putin, iди наxyй” (Putin, fuck you), before switching to Polish to exclaim “Bez Odbioru” (Over and out), and then with a flourish in Ukrainian “Слава Україні” (Slava Ukrayini).
This show of outward support for Ukraine was a stark contrast to the nearby Polish-Ukrainian border town of Rzeszow, where just the day before I had encountered a couple of hundred Polish nationalists gathered in the town square to remember the 1943 Volhynia Massacre of 50,000 to 100,000 ethnic Poles by Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera’s militias. A Polish man in black uniform screamed down the microphone about the “Banderite Ukrainian fascist threat” as bemused international aid workers lounged about drinking beer.
The historian Timothy Synder has described this Central and Eastern European zone as “the bloodlands”: a vast stretch of soil characterised by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia’s slaughter of millions. After years of 20th-century bloodshed, many of its residents remain consumed by their national history. Even in Suwalki, a key point for cross-European solidarity, there are murals dedicated to national conflict. One contemporary mural, on the side of a building, commemorates the Sejny Uprising of 1919, when the minority Polish population of Sejny, a nearby town, led by a secret nationalist group the Polish Military Organisation, attacked the Lithuanian army.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeReaders may not have deduced from the way the word is mentioned in the article that “Bloodlands” is actually the title of Timothy Snyder’s 2010 award-winning book, which is subtitled, “Europe between Hitler and Stalin.” Western readers for whom much in the article is unfamiliar or puzzling, and who want some deeper historical background (how, for example, are Poland and Lithuania “like a couple that broke up but stayed good friends”?), might also find Robert Frost’s The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania of considerable interest. Volume I, the first detailed study in English of this neglected region, was published in 2015, and we’re awaiting the second instalment.
“America talks of a reaffirmed liberal word order”
*world I assume… interesting “Freudian Slip”