A defence plan for the Suwalki Gap was drawn up back in 2022, and Polish troops would also defend the territory in Lithuania, Kęstutis Budrys, an adviser to Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda, has said.
He also noted that the Lithuanian and Polish Armed forces signed the so-called Orsha cooperation agreement, most of which is classified.
“It provides for interoperability measures on both sides of the border, both to ensure security and to respond to certain threats,” Budrys told the Žinių Radijas radio on Thursday.
“The other question would be if the Poles didn’t defend us, how would we defend the Suwalki Gap. The Suwalki Gap is on our defence and concrete planning agenda. There are no legal constraints to make all those plans in this place,” he added.
In his words, both the joint Lithuanian-Polish exercise held before the NATO summit in Vilnius and the exercise taking place in recent days aimed at increasing the frequency of Polish troop movements across the border, providing for joint operations and conditions where troops of both countries could operate together.
His comment came after Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė recently said that despite NATO’s Article 5, Poland’s internal documents “do not foresee an obligation” to send troops abroad in the event of a war, including to Lithuania.
Šimonytė later said she did not mean that “the Poles will not defend us”, but that she was referring to specific legal restrictions that are now being addressed with Poland at the “political level”. She did not specify the restrictions she was referring to.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk visited Lithuania on Monday and said that “the solidarity of Poland and Lithuania in the event of aggression is not questionable”.
According to him, the Polish and Lithuanian foreign and defence ministers would soon “decide on all the details so that there are no communication issues and no uncertainties” on the question.
The Suwalki Gap is a land strip of around 100 kilometres on the Lithuanian-Polish border that is wedged between the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on the west and Belarus on the east.
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