NATO has been put “on alert” by Russian President Valdimir Putin’s “embrace” of President Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus, the Wall Street Journal reported, because allegedly not all of the Russian troops that were involved in the recent “Slavic Brotherhood” exercise in Belarus have left the country. In NATO’s view, Russian troops in Belarus constitute a threat to the so-called Suwalki Gap, the stretch of Poland’s border with Lithuania between Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. That border region is NATO’s only overland connection between the Baltic States and the rest of the Alliance.
According to the Journal, Putin has been pressuring Lukashenko to allow Russian military bases on Belarusian territory. “That could position Russian forces as a pincer on either side of that border,” the Journal claims. In fact, the emergence of the “Suwalki Gap” in the first place is actually a function of the encroachment of NATO ever closer to Russia’s borders and not the result of any supposed threat coming from Russia.
