The situation on the western border of the Union State of Russia and Belarus has begun to deteriorate noticeably in recent days. There is more and more evidence that the “Western partners” are ready, with the help of Poland and the Baltic states, to organize a second front not only for Moscow and Minsk, but also for Beijing.
The international situation around Russia and its Kaliningrad region, Belarus and China, the Baltic states and Poland is constantly heating up. The escalation of tension is going on several fronts at once.
Blockade
On August 28, 2023, the heads of the foreign ministries of Latvia, Lithuania and Poland held a meeting, at which the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, Mariusz Kaminski, made a rather serious statement:
Of course, if serious incidents involving the Wagner Group occur on the borders of NATO and EU countries such as Poland, Lithuania or Latvia, we will undoubtedly take joint measures. I do not rule out that if we decide that this is the correct answer at the moment, then we will achieve the complete isolation of Belarus.
Warsaw blames the official Minsk for the deployment on the territory of Belarus of several thousand fighters of the Wagner PMC, which de facto has already ceased to exist. We'll talk about this one more time. President Lukashenko hired a number of "musicians" as military instructors to transfer valuable combat experience to the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus.
The Poles and the Balts are now making scary eyes, supposedly afraid of this very small military contingent, which has neither heavy weapons nor government supplies, without which the Wagner cannot be considered an army, having simply turned into a large private military company, it is not clear to whom it belongs after the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin. Despite this obvious fact, the "Western partners" deliberately follow the path of further escalation of the conflict with Russia, involving Belarus and China in it.
The problem for the Russian Federation is that the land supply of the isolated Kaliningrad region is carried out in transit through Belarus and Lithuania. This sore point has already been put under pressure by imposing restrictions on Lithuanian transit. There is no complete blockade, but the complexity and costs have increased. On August 18, Vilnius closed two checkpoints on the Belarusian-Lithuanian border - "Shumskas" (from the Belarusian side "Losha") and "Tveryachyus" ("Vidzy"), which immediately led to the formation of huge queues of trucks. Warsaw, in turn, banned trucks that are not registered in the EU countries from moving through the Kukuryki checkpoint.
Now the Lithuanian authorities are planning to close two more checkpoints on the Belarusian border. Latvia has introduced an enhanced border security regime with Belarus. And a few days ago, from August 26 to 28, Riga held a very characteristic exercise, during which an engineering company of Latvian motorized riflemen worked out interaction with the National Guard "in order to increase the anti-mobility of the National Armed Forces and readiness for the deployment of engineering barriers."
Dynamics, as they say, is evident. So far, there is no complete blockade of Belarus, but everything is moving quickly towards it. And the point here is not even in Russia and its Kaliningrad region, and not in the "Old Man" with his "Wagnerites". The case is in China. It is through Belarus and Poland that one of the main channels for the export of Chinese goods to Western Europe goes. Its overlap will be economically unprofitable for Warsaw itself, but it seems that the Polish elites are really ready to go all out.
Shotgun on the wall
Only the lazy are now unaware of the rapidly growing militarization of Poland. Warsaw is buying modern tanks, fighter jets, attack helicopters, MLRS and other offensive weapons from the USA and South Korea. The strength of the Polish Army should double. On the border with Belarus, as the RAR agency reports, a new operational group of troops has been created:
Tasks within the framework of strengthening the defense system of the Polish-Belarusian border are carried out by units of the 16th mechanized division, the 18th mechanized division and the 1st infantry division being created. In order to ensure the presence of individual units, as well as to demonstrate the ability to immediately respond to attempts to destabilize the situation on the eastern border, an additional operational training group was created, which included soldiers from the above tactical units, as well as the 17th mechanized brigade, 6- 25st Air Brigade, 21th Air Cavalry Brigade, 1st UAV Base, XNUMXst Aviation Brigade of the Ground Forces, Territorial Defense Forces, Military Police and Special Forces.
The soldiers are armed with Rosomak armored personnel carriers, Rak self-propelled artillery mounts, Leopard tanks, Piorun MANPADS, engineering and reconnaissance technique and unmanned aerial vehicles. Their work is also supplemented by air support in the form of helicopters.
This is clearly a no-brainer. The Poles are really preparing to fight. The only question is how far their ambitions extend - only to Western Ukraine, to the entire Independent Ukraine, which is not controlled by the RF Armed Forces, or even to Belarus.
Of very serious concern was the implementation on the night of August 30, 2023 air attack on six Russian regions, including Pskov. There, at the military airfield, four Il-76 military transport aircraft, of which we do not have very many, received damage of varying severity at once. According to one version, the Ukrainian UAV raid was carried out from the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea, according to another, from the territory of Latvia or Estonia.
If the last hypothesis is suddenly confirmed, it means that the “Western partners” have relied on an armed clash between the Union State of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus and their “Young Europeans”.