By Independent News Roundup
The Baltic States’ Defense Ministers signed a statement of intent in late January for forming their own “military Schengen”, which refers to the agreement signed two years ago in January 2024 between the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland for expediting the flow of troops and equipment. Belgium and France are also expected to join the original “military Schengen”, whose members aim to slash to 3-5 days the estimated 45 days that it currently takes to send the aforesaid from the Atlantic to the Eastern Flank.
Upon their modernization, both in terms of infrastructure and legal coordination, the two “military Schengens” will form a contiguous zone of free military movement between the Pyrenees and the approach to St. Petersburg. To be sure, this is a work in progress that won’t be completed anytime soon, especially its Baltic portion. Poland only just opened the portion of the “Via Baltica” highway between itself and Lithuania, while the “Rail Baltica” between them and Estonia is even further behind schedule.
Nevertheless, the unmistakable trend is that NATO is optimizing its military logistics, particularly along its Eastern Flank whose members agreed to turbocharge their militarization during mid-December’s inaugural summit. In connection with that, readers also shouldn’t forget that the Baltic States and Poland are building something called the “EU Defense Line”, which combines the first’s “Baltic Defense Line” and the second’s “East Shield” into what’s de facto a new Iron Curtain that’ll include anti-personnel mines.
This Baltic Front of the New Cold War between NATO and Russia relies heavily on Poland, which already has the EU’s largest military and the third-largest in NATO, with plans to expand from 215,000 troops to 300,000 by 2030 then half a million by 2039 (200,000 of whom will be reservists). Both the Via and Rail Baltica megaprojects, which are the regional flagships of the Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative”, will connect Poland to Latvia’s and Estonia’s borders with Russia for rapid force deployment in a crisis.
The involvement of the EU’s largest military in any such NATO-Russian crisis would inevitably drag the rest of those two overlapping blocs in any whatever war might then follow in the worst-case scenario. If the Baltic States hadn’t agreed to form their own “military Schengen”, and if the associated “Baltica” logistical projects weren’t being built, then potential border incidents could be more easily manageable. Instead, they’d likely result in a speedy deployment of Polish troops, thus escalating matters into a crisis.
Moving beyond the military significance of this recent development and into its political significance, Poland is clearly establishing a sphere of influence over the Baltic States, which is actually a return to history. Casual observers probably aren’t aware, but the Warsaw-led Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth once stretched as far north as southern Estonia and even controlled parts of Latvia for centuries till the Third Partition in 1795. This is part of Poland’s plan to revive its long-lost Great Power status.
The overarching trend is that Poland is preparing to lead Russia’s containment along the Baltic Front, which could also place more pressure upon Kaliningrad (which borders Poland and Lithuania) and Belarus (which borders Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia). The eventual merger of these two “military Schengens” could embolden Poland to more actively, even aggressively, contain Russia by ensuring that back-up would speedily arrive from the EU hinterland or even the US homeland in the event of a crisis.
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