Yesterday Lulashenko was in St. Petersburg and said something along the lines of "the Wagner mercenaries want to go for an escursion to Warsaw, I'm trying to stop them".
Monday there was a news that Wagner will have joint exercises with Belarus military on the border with Poland
A week ago Putin warned Poland to not attack Belarus
Nearly a month ago after Wagner was exiliated to Belarus, polish Deputy PM said they will be strengthening the border security with Belarus ( because of Wagner )
In short the tension between Poland and Belarus+Russia is increasing, and if Russia really wants to invade Poland, the Suwalki gap is the most obvious place
Putin also said 4 days ago: "The western territories of present-day Poland are a gift from Stalin to the Poles, have our friends in Warsaw forgotten about this? We will remind you." [1].
So, I wonder what he's doing. Trying to start a conflict in a different spot because he needs some wins but his troops are in a quagmire/losing ground in Ukraine? Trying to bluff to see if NATO will actually respond to an invasion of Poland? I wonder if the NATO leaders is more comfortable doing bombing runs against Belarussian troops, because hey, they're not Russian, so it's not yet a Russia vs NATO conflict?
Apparently he's bombing grain depots in Odesa to starve the poorer regions of the world and expecting it will flood Europe with refugees... which may work very well indeed, and causing a further lurch to the right in Europe.
> Apparently he's bombing grain depots in Odesa to starve the poorer regions of the world and expecting it will flood Europe with refugees... which may work very well indeed, and causing a further lurch to the right in Europe.
In theory, but we are talking about a chain of events which will lead several years into the future. No grain today does not mean that people will start moving tomorrow.
> Trying to bluff to see if NATO will actually respond to an invasion of Poland?
Possibly. They might try a "little green men" scenario where these aren't Russian or Belorussian forces, but "Wagner" forces.
Darker possibility: after the mutiny, Wagner are extremely dangerous to Putin. But they're also too dangerous to move against directly. They've been parked in Belarus to give the sides some distance. Maybe they're going to be ordered into Poland to get rid of them (killed or captured), making them NATO's problem.
(What was the old Mission Impossible line about "if you are caught, we will deny any knowledge of you and your actions"?)
> Possibly. They might try a "little green men" scenario where these aren't Russian or Belorussian forces, but "Wagner" forces.
NATO would not assume those are "separatists" -- which is the excuse they used in Ukraine c. 2014.
> Maybe they're going to be ordered into Poland to get rid of them (killed or captured), making them NATO's problem.
Wagner is an organ of the Russian military and always has been; there is no "maybe they'll go into Poland to get rid of them" because that would trigger NATO article 5 and basically WW3.
> (What was the old Mission Impossible line about "if you are caught, we will deny any knowledge of you and your actions"?)
Plausible deniability does not work this way. No one will pretend that "maybe they're someone else, cuz, like, they denied it" -- if anything happens in Poland it will be 100% because Moscow ok'd it happening.
Recently Andrey Kartapolov (who is responsible for Russia's digital draft) said “There is something called the Suwalki corridor. Should something happen, we would need this corridor very much. Strike forces are ready to occupy this corridor within hours”. This statement raised speculation that the Wagner forces (former Wagner forces?) were relocated to Belarus with this objective in mind.
I don't really understand the motivations behind the statement, and it hasn't been reported on particularly widely in the more serious news outlets, so I think it's probably just your normal day-to-day sabre rattling. An attack on NATO seems a particularly unlikely step for Putin to take.
If we want to save the planet, we should go to war against Russia, not just eternal defense. Sometimes war is necessary to end war.
To save the planet from Climate Crisis and other matters, the only way that will work is a unified planet. That will never happen when there's Russia (and co.) who want to dominate the planet.
A great place to start would be taking Kaliningrad and thereby better geographically unifying the Baltic countries with the EU, instead of Russia succeeding by linking itself with Kaliningrad by taking the Suwalki Gap.
We need to start preparing for war. No, we should have already been prepared for war a long a time ago -- we should have already gone to war and won by now. But better start now than even later.
I think you're wildly optimistic to think that we can sustain both wars at once, or maybe even more wildly optimistic to think that Taiwan wouldn't be invaded within a year of starting a war with Russia.
