On the day Zelensky visits the Ukrainian special forces engaged in the counter-offensive near Bakhmut, another potential front of the Ukrainian conflict emerges in the Baltic area.
Warsaw raised the alarm about the alleged movement of a hundred Wagner mercenaries from Belarus to the so-called Suwałki Corridor, strategic passage that connects the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad to Lukashenko’s country, squeezed between two NATO member states: Poland and Lithuania. The Wagner private militia continues to pose a threat to the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, according to whom it is “a step towards a further hybrid attack on Polish territory”. “Now – he said – the situation is even more dangerous. We have information according to which more than 100 mercenaries from the Wagner group have moved towards the Suwałki corridor. They will probably be disguised as Belarusian border guards and will help illegal immigrants to enter Polish territory (…) but maybe they will also try to infiltrate Poland by posing as illegal immigrants,” Morawiecki added. The Suwałki Corridor crosses Belarus, narrow and loyal ally of Moscow, which at the moment would host the bulk of Yevgheny Prigozhin’s private army.
Virtually uninhabited, this thin strip of no-man’s land is crossed by a single railway and two arterial roads and is indicated by analysts as a potential Achilles heel of NATO in the area, because if Moscow or whoever decides to invade it militarily, it would become a wedge between Poland and the three Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia). In Ukraine, meanwhile, the counter-offensive towards the south, in the Zaporizhzhia region, is gaining ground – even if Moscow claims to have inflicted heavy losses on the enemy in the region – and is aiming decisively towards Crimea, which according to the head of military intelligence in Kiev, Kyrylo Budanov, will be released “soon”. According to Ukrainian intelligence, a temporary ammunition depot of the Russian occupiers was blown up in the night between Friday and Saturday with grenades thrown by “saboteurs”. But just in Zaporizhzhia two people died and another was injured in a Russian missile attack. Acting mayor of the city, Anatoly Kurtev, quoted by Ukrinform, said that “an enemy rocket hit an open area. Unfortunately, a man and a woman were killed. Another woman was injured.” Several buildings, an educational institution and a supermarket were damaged as a result of the attack. And today, on the day that Ukraine has decided to dedicate to the special forces, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, paid his respects, surprisingly visiting the elite troops at the advanced point of the other tooth of the counteroffensive: that of Bakhmut, still garrisoned by Russian forces but being encircled, albeit slowly, from the north and south. Bakhmut had been conquered by the Russians – thanks to Wagner’s militiamen and at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties – last May, and Kiev is dedicating a lot of its energies to reconquering this city, completely destroyed, uninhabited and of questionable strategic value, but with a high symbolic value: therefore, in Kiev’s plans, psychologically decisive for the continuation of the war.
Moscow, meanwhile, claims to have hit the headquarters of the security services with a precision missile on Friday evening in Dnipro, in the central-eastern part of Ukraine. Kiev admits that the target was hit, but denounces that the explosion damaged a residential building, with nine civilians injured, including two minors. From St. Petersburg, after the summit with African countries, Vladimir Putin, who has promised free grain for several countries on that continent (although the WFP informs us that no concrete offer has yet arrived), states that he has received various proposals for peace from his interlocutors. But the African Union (AU) reports that the countries that took part in the summit have asked Moscow to reinstate the tripartite agreement on wheat with Kiev and Ankara and the UN umbrella, from which it recently unilaterally withdrew. In Moscow, which in recent days is heavily bombing the Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea from which the export of cereals departed, a new appeal has also arrived from the South African president Ramamphosa, after the one launched by the Egyptian to Sisi: Countries that enjoy good relations with the Kremlin. The war in Africa between Russia and the West is therefore in full swing, also thanks to the contribution of the Wagner group itself – which therefore returned from the window of Putin’s geopolitical plans after the armed rebellion at the end of June.
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