Having a neighbor like Russia at the end of the street means 59-year-old Vytas Grudzinskas doesn’t get much rest. “I can see the soldiers best at night,” he says, pointing to a patch of green behind his neighbor’s garden.
“They have a shooting range they use over there behind that field. In the afternoon, you can hear the guns,” he said.
Grudzinskas has his own weapon, a machine gun, which he keeps locked in a cupboard, close at hand — although his guard dog, a Maltese terrier, might be less effective in battle.
The small city of Kybartai where Grudzinska lives lies inside both NATO and the European Union but also along one of the world’s hottest borders — the Suwalki corridor. This tract of land, about 60 miles wide, is sandwiched between Russia’s heavily fortified, nuclear-armed, Baltic bolthole of Kaliningrad and its ally, Belarus.
The pass — viewed by many analysts as a weak point within NATO — is caught in a pincer grip between Kremlin troops. The fear is that if…
