Russia’s Navy and Air Force is engaging in an “unprecendented” level of activity in and around the Baltic Sea this week, according to Poland’s Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak.  He says the Russian maneuvers were most likely designed to test NATO’s reactions.

NATO released video shot by a Dutch F-16 fighter jet showing the Dutch intercepting what appears to be two Russian Su-27 on Monday.  On Tuesday, Norway said one of its warplanes had a “near miss” to the north of the country with a Russian fighter.  Finland says its air force is monitoring “unusually intense” activity over the Gulf of Finland as Russian bombers, fighters and transport planes moved between the Russian mainland and its exclave of Kaliningrad, which is located on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.

Siemoniak said that Poland was not under threat of attack.  But Lithuania put its military’s rapid-response force on a “higher state of preparedness” in light of “a rise in the activity of the Russian Federation's forces in the Kaliningrad region as well as in the western part of the Russian Federation,” according to a top general.

Moscow used to have greater, unquestioned access to the Baltic Sea.  Poland’s capital city gave its name to the old Warsaw Pact of Soviet nations that peered at NATO from across the Iron Curtain during the post-war years.  But Poland joined NATO in 1999, years after the fall of Soviet-style Communism, and three other former SSRs – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – joined the western alliance in 2004.  Finland and Sweden remain neutral, meaning that Kaliningrad is its only friendly shore on the Baltic.