Vilnius's Civil Defence Department named Poland as one of the Lithuanian capital's evacuation directions if war reached the country, department head Žygimantas Solovjovas told Polish Radio, according to Dorzeczy on September 17, 2026. Poland's Podlaskie Voivodeship, which borders Lithuania, is being prepared as a transit route for evacuated Baltic residents, with local government units across the region involved in the contingency planning.
Vilnius sits roughly 40 km from the Belarusian border. Solovjovas said the capital's evacuation plan sets three directions: south to Poland, north toward Panevėžys and Šiauliai, and west toward Kaunas and Klaipėda. He added a caveat that cuts against how an evacuation route sounds in the abstract: "Residents of Vilnius should not assume that during shelling they will escape from the city along one of the evacuation routes." During active shelling, the guidance is to shelter, not drive.
The plan sits inside a nine-country framework, not a Lithuania-only arrangement
Lithuania's routes are one piece of a wider structure. Poland signed a memorandum in Stockholm on February 6, 2026 with Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on the temporary cross-border movement of civilians during a serious crisis or war, per Goniec's reporting on September 7. Goniec's own framing of the pact's purpose is protecting the population while enabling that cross-border movement, so that the state itself can still defend its territory.
Poland's own Krajowy Plan Ewakuacji (National Evacuation Plan) folds all 16 voivodeships' evacuation documents into one system, coordinated between the Government Centre for Security and the Polish Army General Staff. Those documents were due in October 2025 and delivered by January 2026; the national plan is being finalized this year.
Why the Suwałki Gap makes this a two-way concern
Poland and Lithuania share the Suwałki Gap, also called the Suwałki Corridor, the roughly 65 km strip of NATO territory between Belarus and Russia's Kaliningrad exclave that is the only land link between the Baltic states and the rest of the alliance. A route that lets Lithuanian civilians move south into Poland runs through that same strip, one NATO planners have long identified as the alliance's most exposed chokepoint - ground that would need to stay open for military resupply at the same time civilian evacuation traffic used it. AirVeto's own reporting on Lithuania's counter-mobility fortification plan covers the parallel effort to slow an armored column approaching that same border from the other direction.
The plan is a contingency, not a signal that war is imminent
Nothing in Solovjovas's statement or Poland's national plan ties this evacuation framework to a specific new threat assessment. Civil-defence agencies in NATO's Baltic and Nordic states have spent 2025 and 2026 building out these plans as standing infrastructure, the same category of preparedness as the counter-mobility parks along Lithuania's own border. What changed on September 17 was visibility: a named official, on the record, stating plainly that Poland is where part of Vilnius would send its people.
The live map shows current conditions over the Baltic region.