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‘The Russians could come any time’: fear at Suwałki Gap on EU border
Sixty-mile strip on edge of Poland and Lithuania is seen as vulnerable due to its position between Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus
Stefan Bilas, 68, says he hears the Russians sometimes. It can be the growl of tanks that drowns out the gentle clucking of the chickens in his front yard, or more often the whirr of attack helicopters or the deafening roar of fighter jets, destination unknown.
Artillery fire was heard the other night and there is a shooting range somewhere over there, he points. The lights of a Russian watchtower can be seen at the dead of night. “Peace,” toasts the retired farmer, knocking back a vodka.
Bilas, the son of a Ukrainian forcibly resettled to the area by the Soviets in 1947 under Operation Vistula, Joseph Stalin’s attempt to de-Germanise territory under his control, was born and bred in this Polish village, Rudziszki, where the one road of 63 houses ends at a closed gate to a forest. Entrance is forbidden. Strangers to the village are not even allowed to walk as far as Bilas’s home.
That is because the trees mark where Poland stops and the 5,800 sq mile (15,000 sq km) exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea begins. Bilas’s small white-washed house is the last on the road, about 50 metres from the gate.
The forest – just 100 metres deep but thick and tall – covers almost all sins. For while Bilas and his wife, Halina, 65, and their neighbours Henryka Wolodzko, 63, and Jan Wolodzko, 67, can hear the Russians, they cannot see them, they say, as Halina places a plate of garlic sausage and salted tomato slices on the kitchen table. Nor do they want to.
“I think about it every day,” says Bilas, knocking back another shot. “They could come any time. Kill us in our beds.” “What do I think of them?” he says, picking up a copy of a Polish-language biography of Ukraine’s president, Volodoymr Zelenskiy. “I’d better not say.”
This is “Suwałki Gap” territory, the 60-mile or so long strip of land around the border of Poland and Lithuania that is straddled to the west by the Russians and to the east by Kremlin-friendly Belarus.
It is, military analysts say, where Vladimir Putin would probably strike first should he decide that western involvement in his war in Ukraine has left him with nothing to lose.
(...)
www.theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com
Sixty-mile strip on edge of Poland and Lithuania is seen as vulnerable due to its position between Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus
Stefan Bilas, 68, says he hears the Russians sometimes. It can be the growl of tanks that drowns out the gentle clucking of the chickens in his front yard, or more often the whirr of attack helicopters or the deafening roar of fighter jets, destination unknown.
Artillery fire was heard the other night and there is a shooting range somewhere over there, he points. The lights of a Russian watchtower can be seen at the dead of night. “Peace,” toasts the retired farmer, knocking back a vodka.
Bilas, the son of a Ukrainian forcibly resettled to the area by the Soviets in 1947 under Operation Vistula, Joseph Stalin’s attempt to de-Germanise territory under his control, was born and bred in this Polish village, Rudziszki, where the one road of 63 houses ends at a closed gate to a forest. Entrance is forbidden. Strangers to the village are not even allowed to walk as far as Bilas’s home.
That is because the trees mark where Poland stops and the 5,800 sq mile (15,000 sq km) exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea begins. Bilas’s small white-washed house is the last on the road, about 50 metres from the gate.
The forest – just 100 metres deep but thick and tall – covers almost all sins. For while Bilas and his wife, Halina, 65, and their neighbours Henryka Wolodzko, 63, and Jan Wolodzko, 67, can hear the Russians, they cannot see them, they say, as Halina places a plate of garlic sausage and salted tomato slices on the kitchen table. Nor do they want to.
“I think about it every day,” says Bilas, knocking back another shot. “They could come any time. Kill us in our beds.” “What do I think of them?” he says, picking up a copy of a Polish-language biography of Ukraine’s president, Volodoymr Zelenskiy. “I’d better not say.”
This is “Suwałki Gap” territory, the 60-mile or so long strip of land around the border of Poland and Lithuania that is straddled to the west by the Russians and to the east by Kremlin-friendly Belarus.
It is, military analysts say, where Vladimir Putin would probably strike first should he decide that western involvement in his war in Ukraine has left him with nothing to lose.
(...)
