Sweden: hundreds of volunteers mobilized for evacuation exercises on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea

Sweden conducted mass evacuation drills on a strategic island in the Baltic Sea on Wednesday, as the country struggles to prepare for crisis scenarios since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Around 200 volunteers were tasked with organizing the evacuation of the island of Gotland on Wednesday morning, without being given a reason. The exercise aimed in particular to finalize the evacuation of people with special needs.

Some of the volunteers were thus given a specific role, for example behaving as if they were suffering from dementia, or carrying an animal with them - although only dummy animals were used for the exercise. Hundreds of others, from different organizations or government structures, participated in the exercise.

“This exercise is the first of this scale in Gotland, and the reason is that Sweden and other countries are working on their resilience capacities in the face of crises of different types,” Charlotte Petri Gornitzka, governor of Gotland, told AFP. Work on an evacuation plan began three years ago, and the exercise aimed to test its implementation in practice.

Less than 350 kilometers separate the island from Kaliningrad

The volunteers first gathered in the town of Visby, from where they were taken by bus to a second location, designated as the first evacuation site. The buses then took them to a reception center organized in a community building in the center of the island, designated to be the accommodation and catering site for the evacuees. Gotland has frequently been described as a likely target in the event of conflict in the Baltic Sea.

“I don’t feel the threat, but it’s a reality. There is a war going on in Ukraine, we are close by, and we have a very strategic position in the Baltic Sea,” said Lars-Goran Uddholm, a 75-year-old retiree who volunteered for the exercise. Gotland is less than 350 kilometers from the coast of Kaliningrad, a militarized Russian territory, landlocked in the EU between the sea, Poland and Lithuania.

Due to this position, Swedish military doctrine considers that whoever controls Gotland is capable of controlling air and naval traffic in the Baltic Sea, making it a priority issue in the event of war. “A lot of people see it as (a threat) distant. But it's a lot closer than people want to think,” William Olsson, a 20-year-old student, told AFP. Sweden ended two centuries of military non-alignment following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, joining NATO in March 2024.