The Ministry of the Interior of Belarus, in a statement, informed the press that a clear interaction plan with the private paramilitary company Wagner. The plan would have arisen following the meeting between the minister Ivan Kurbakov and some representatives of Wagner.
"The agenda of the meeting included the issues of interaction with the private military company and the training of our soldiers by its instructors. The parties developed a clear plan of action and exchanged views on the use of certain types of equipment“, reads the note of the press service quoted by the Russian Tass agency.
Minsk said on July 20 that members of Belarus' special operations forces would conduct combat training missions alongside Wagner fighters at the Brestsky training ground near the border with Poland.
Following threats from Putin"Part of its territory is a gift from Stalin, we will remind him“, Poland has reinforced its borders to the east by sending armored vehicles and at least a thousand men.
In 1945 the Soviet Union, winner of the world war, wanted to expand to the west. He did it directly at the expense of Poland, occupying all of its eastern part. This, also to the detriment of Germany, by taking away the historical regions Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and part of Brandenburg, turned over to Warsaw up to the Oder and Neisse rivers, as partial compensation for the territorial losses suffered in the east.
But there is nothing for the Poles to thank Stalin for, writes Huffington Post, because in the colossal exchange they lost, and a lot. In fact, Poland found itself with a total area of 312 square kilometers, against 386 before the war. A loss of 74 thousand sq km. particularly unfair for a country that in 1939 had been attacked and divided between Adolf Hitler and the Soviet dictator.
It was the most gigantic border shift in the history of Europe. A real dislocation for hundreds of kilometers to the west. Tens of millions of Polish and German refugees were victims of an immense ethnic cleansing, expelled and forced to leave their homes and fields where they had lived for centuries. Lithuania benefited from it, which recovered the historic capital Vilnius/Wilno, Belarus and Ukraine, which went Lviv/Leopoli, but also Russia, which directly annexed northern Prussia as an exclave, the cradle of Germany with the city of Königsberg, Emmanuel Kant's homeland. Which was renamed Kaliningrad, artificially imposing the name of the Stalinist hierarch Michail Kalinin.
However, Putin's historical falsifications could be dangerous because they risk igniting new micro-conflicts a Kaliningrad and in Lithuanian corridor of Suwalki, a strategic area paid attention to by NATO which would connect the Russian exclave to Putin's Belarus.
The Suwalki Corridor
The corridor between Poland and Lithuania was established after the Suwalki Agreement of 1920, but it was of little importance in the interwar period as at the time the Polish territories extended further to the north-east, while during the Cold War Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union and Poland belonged to the Warsaw Pact. But after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact, all the countries in the Baltic area joined both the European Union and NATO. Subsequently, both Russia and EU countries showed great interest in the corridor and in using it as a transit route for goods and people. In the 90s and early 2000s, Russia attempted to negotiate the creation of an extraterritorial corridor linking exclaves of Kaliningrad with Grodno in Belarus, but Poland, Lithuania and the European Union objected.
Tensions between NATO, Poland and Lithuania with Russia over the use of the Suwałki Corridor escalated in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and then escalated further after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. These tensions have led to in spring 2022 NATO and Lithuania to strengthen the military presence in the corridor area and the European Union in June 2022 to block its use, effectively preventing the passage by land to and from Kaliningrad, as a consequence of the sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
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