In this region of lakes and forests, life passes without shocks. An idyll of peace and serenity. A fairy tale. Or, as you look, horror.
“No. At all. No, no,” he laughs, when he is asked if he feels fear, Krystyna Kotwica, neighbor of a wooden house village near Belarus. “Here I feel the safest person in the world.”
The noise and the fury of today sound remote on these deserted roads between gigantic conifers and these channels where tourists make kayak. The impression is misleading. For a few days, this strip on the border of Poland with Belarus and Ukraine is the scene of the greatest moment of tension between NATO and Russia since this country invaded Ukraine in 2022.
In less than a week, it will also strengthen the defense of the Eastern Front. Russia and his ally, Belarus, have launched military exercises on the other side of the border. Poland has responded by closing the Polish-Bielorrusa border and has announced the deployment of 40,000 soldiers in the area.
This is today a hypermilitarized area, the equivalent in the 21st century of what in the thirties was the Danzig corridor or that of Fulda in the Cold War. A hot point on the continent. The last war front of NATO. The place where, if a war with Russia broke out, the spark could jump.
And it would be a curious place to start a war, a mixture of beautiful natural places and intimidating military infrastructure. The Augustów forest. The metal fence – a true wall built to stop the entry of immigrants – that divides the forest between the Polish and the Belarusa. In the north direction, which Vladimir Putin could ambition to connect the Russian enclave of Kalinningrad with Belarus. Espino wires, prohibited posters pass, a radar at the top of a hill surrounded by pastures.
If Putin, when launching his drones towards Poland, wanted to test that country, the NATO and the president of the United States, Donald Trump, also tested the reaction of the Poles on foot and, especially, of those who live near the border.
There are those who remove iron at the matter: there is not so much with the drones … At the doors of the cinema of a Suwałki shopping center, on Friday night, three friends discussed the origin of those devices. Iwona and Krystian expressed doubts that they were Russian and echoed the theory according to which Ukraine had sent them to force Poland and NATO to get more involved in the war. The third, Michał, pointed to the danger of misinformation campaigns. The three were about to watch a horror movie.
A habitual regret in these towns and cities: that the headlines on war or expressions such as Suwałki corridor scare tourists. At local scale, for some that problem is more serious than a possible Russian invasion. Yes, the interviewees coincide, there are preparing for any possibility. But no, no one believes that we are on the eve of World War III, or the direct clash with Russia. Not yet.
On the highway that connects the capital, Warsaw, with the city Augustów, and further north with the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, luminous panels announce that the border with Belarus has been closed. Public radio issues that day to a ammunition factory, and reported on Russian and Belarusian military exercises. In the Catholic and conservative station Radio María criticize the EU for forest regulations.
Past Augustów, in the direction of Belarus by increasingly solitary roads and among increasingly thick forests, the district headquarters are reached. The mayor expects in the City Council, Michał Piotr Skubis.
“I try to keep calm,” says Skubis, 32. He says that there is no reason to be alarmed: tanks do not circulate or there are thousands of immigrants from Belarusia (since years the fence prevents them from passing). For him, in his daily work, there is a greater problem than the Russian threat: the damage that the war (and also the migratory crisis) have caused to the image of the district.
“Here many people live from tourism,” he says. “In ten years it has fallen between 20 and 40%. It is a hard blow.”
“Of course, the threat of a large -scale invasion exists,” continues the mayor, “but it is minimal, because today an attack against Poland would mean nothing more and nothing less than the activation of NATO article 5: an attack on Poland would be considered an attack on all. I do not think it is possible in the coming years.”
When asked if you have plans to evacuate the population in case of Russian attack, he replies: “I am not authorized to say exactly what they are, but I will tell you that we constantly work on it. In fact, just before you arrived, we were talking about it. We thought about it.”
The discussion about the scope of the threat is even more intense in the capitals. And decisive when financing rearme policies. There is no NATO country that, in proportion to its economy, spends as much as Poland: in the new strategic national review, a key document of the French government, it reads: “On the horizon of the next years, and from here to 2030, the main threat to France and Europeans is the one that raises the risk of an open war against the heart of Europe”.
A dirt road next to the channel that connects with Belarus leads to a nineteenth -century lock. The marriage formed by Alicja and Sławomir is responsible for managing it. Alicja remembers a strange episode that occurred next to the channel and the lock some time ago. He saw a man taking photographs, approached him, asked him to show him the camera and saw that he had taken images of the lock, from the City of Płaska and a border police building. He noticed that he spoke with Russian accent. A spy? In case of war, the lock and the channel could be strategic objectives.
Fear of war? “Yes, it can happen,” says Alicja, and Sławomir adds half a joke: “Anyway, if something happens, we make your bags and go to Spain.”
The elderly, both say, fear more a war than young people. The wounds of Russian imperialism are deep in this part of Europe. Following the forest roads to the border fence with Belarus, a wooden cross with a plaque is raised: “Here are two Poles who died at the hands of the Bolsheviks. September 1939”.
So close to the border, the phones capture the Belarus signal. A straight path leads to the fence, a camera observes visitors.
“With the army and the border guard,” celebrates Kotwica, “there are so many agents that it is as if we had one for each inhabitant.” When he met the news of the drone incursion, he first worried, but immediately realized that “it was not war.” “You can’t spend your scared time,” he says. “You have to think clearly.”
