Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad has become the sharpest edge of NATO's deterrence debate. American commanders now speak openly about plans to neutralise the region's air defences within days if Moscow attacks the alliance — while Poland's foreign minister is urging NATO to drill so aggressively around the exclave that Vladimir Putin is forced to pull troops out of Ukraine to defend it.
"Take down" Kaliningrad's air defences — the new NATO doctrine
Speaking at the Association of the U.S. Army's inaugural LandEuro conference in Wiesbaden, General Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, said the alliance now has the ability to "take down" Kaliningrad using ground-based operations "in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than we've ever been able to do."
The concept, dubbed the "Eastern Flank Deterrence Line," rethinks how NATO would respond to a Russian attack on the eastern flank, drawing directly on lessons from the war in Ukraine. A U.S. Army document published in 2026 explicitly lists the destruction of Russia's A2/AD (anti-access/area denial) systems in Kaliningrad, Belarus and the St. Petersburg area among its objectives — no longer just newspaper speculation, but stated military planning.
The distinction matters. Western planners describe neutralising Kaliningrad's military infrastructure in the event of a Russian attack — a deterrent response scenario. There is no evidence of any plan to seize or annex the exclave itself, whatever Moscow's propaganda claims.
Sikorski: make Putin uncertain — and pull his troops out of Ukraine
Poland wants to turn that deterrence posture into pressure on the Ukrainian front. Speaking at a September 11 panel during the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv, Polish deputy prime minister and foreign minister Radosław Sikorski proposed that NATO hold drills in proximity of Kaliningrad to push Moscow to weaken its military posture in Ukraine.
Sikorski said Russia's invasion has stripped the exclave's defences bare. "We closely monitor, as you may imagine, the Kaliningrad exclave. There are hardly any troops there," he said. "I'm suggesting we should exercise so aggressively on our side as to make [Putin] uncertain of what we will do, and so that he needs to draw forces away from Ukraine."
The numbers back his reading. A 2023 report by the U.S. Center for Naval Analyses found that before the war, Kaliningrad's 11th Army Corps fielded composite ground forces of up to 18,000 troops. Last September, Lithuania's defence ministry estimated only "several thousand" Russian troops were stationed in the exclave even during the Zapad 2025 joint drill with Belarus — the garrison has been hollowed out to feed the war in Ukraine.
Warsaw is backing words with concrete. Under Poland's East Shield initiative, worth around 10 billion zloty ($2.7 billion), the military is building fortifications and terrain obstacles along roughly 800 kilometres of border with Kaliningrad and Belarus, and Poland is preparing to host the first military drills of the so-called Coalition of the Willing with British and French forces.
Moscow's answer: warnings of "direct confrontation"
The Kremlin has reacted with fury. Russia's embassy in Belgium, which handles Moscow's diplomatic contacts with NATO, warned — via TASS — that any attempt to isolate Kaliningrad could trigger a direct military confrontation, claiming Russia has enough weapons to defend the exclave and would use its "entire arsenal." The embassy said NATO's "reckless and irresponsible approach sharply increases the risks of a direct military confrontation with our country."
Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Russian parliament's international affairs committee, went further, claiming an attack on Kaliningrad "will mean an attack on Russia, with all due retaliatory measures stipulated, among other things, by its nuclear doctrine" — and accusing NATO of posing a "threat to global security and stability."
It is a familiar inversion: Moscow militarised Kaliningrad for years, then denounced the anxiety its own posture generated as proof of a Western plot. But the context is a Russia that invaded Ukraine, threatens the Baltic states, and whose officials openly discuss striking NATO — while its actual garrison in Kaliningrad sits at a fraction of its pre-war strength.
For Ukraine, the logic Sikorski outlined is brutally simple: every Russian battalion tied down guarding the Baltic is a battalion that is not shelling Kharkiv or assaulting the Donbas. Kaliningrad, once Moscow's unsinkable aircraft carrier on the Baltic, is becoming a strategic liability — and NATO knows it.
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