Polish minister proposes drills near Kaliningrad to draw Russian troops from Ukraine

WARSAW, Poland — NATO allies could hold drills in proximity of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave in an attempt to push Moscow to weaken its military posture in Ukraine and withdraw some of its troops there, said Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister.

Speaking at a Sept. 11 panel discussion held during the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv, Sikorski said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in the Kremlin lowering its defenses in the Kaliningrad exclave, which borders Poland and Lithuania.

While NATO should not engage in any offensive actions against Kaliningrad, an intensification of the alliance’s drills around the area could force Russia to remove some of its forces from Ukraine, the official said.

“We should not be thinking about our confrontation with Russia only as being confined to Ukraine,” Sikorski said. “I was in Latvia just three days ago on a Polish base, we have a tank company there, and … there are no troops on the other side. We closely monitor, as you may imagine, the Kaliningrad exclave. There are hardly any troops there.”

“I’m suggesting we should exercise so aggressively on our side as to make … [Russian President Vladimir Putin] uncertain of what we will do, and so that he needs to draw forces away from Ukraine,” the deputy prime minister said.

A 2023 report by the U.S. Center for Naval Analyses indicates that, prior to the war in Ukraine, Kaliningrad’s military capabilities had been boosted with the deployment of various forces, including the 11th Army Corps whose composite ground forces alone had a nominal count of up to 18,000 troops.

Last September, as Russia and Belarus were preparing the “Zapad 2025” joint military drill, the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence estimated that only “several thousand” troops were to be stationed in Kaliningrad for the exercise.

Sikorski’s statement comes as Poland is readying to host the first military drills for the so-called Coalition of the Willing with British and French forces. At the same time, under the country’s East Shield initiative worth around 10 billion zloty ($2.7 billion), the Polish military is advancing projects to ramp up defensive infrastructure, including fortifications and natural terrain obstacles along the roughly 800 km (497 miles) of the nation’s border with Kaliningrad and Belarus.