The map looks familiar: Baltic ports, Nordic railways, highways threading through forests toward Germany and Poland. Europe has spent decades studying such networks for trade and logistics.
Now, governments are studying them for a different purpose. They want to plan how millions of civilians would leave the region if war erupted.
Ten countries across northern Europe have begun to craft plans to evacuate civilians across borders in the event of a major crisis or military conflict. The initiative, announced by Sweden on March 4, will coordinate transport systems, border procedures, travel corridors, and reception mechanisms for refugees.
The participating states also include Germany, Poland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Their agreement is designed to allow temporary population movements across borders in the event of war or other severe crises affecting the Baltic Sea and the Nordic region.
At first glance, the initiative resembles an expanded civil protection exercise. In reality, it signals a deeper shift in how Europe’s most security-aware governments think about resilience.
The catalyst is Ukraine. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, around 6 million civilians have fled, creating the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II and forcing governments to manage sudden mass population flows across borders.
Northern European officials increasingly view these movements not simply as humanitarian emergencies but as factors that directly influence the ability of a country to continue defending itself. Swedish authorities have argued that the temporary relocation of civilians can allow military forces to operate while reducing risks to the population in conflict zones.
This changes the logic of civil defense.
For decades, European crisis planning assumed that wars would remain geographically distant or limited in scope. Civil protection focused mainly on natural disasters, industrial accidents, and humanitarian relief operations. Wartime evacuation scenarios largely disappeared from public planning until the war in Ukraine reversed that assumption.
The Nordic-Baltic initiative is designed to address precisely that problem. The agreement allows governments to coordinate how people would be transported, how border crossings would operate, and how displaced populations would be registered and received in neighboring countries.
The geographic logic is clear.
The Baltic Sea region forms a tightly interconnected system of transport networks linking the Nordic countries, Central Europe, and NATO’s eastern flank. If a major security crisis emerged, populations would almost certainly cross multiple borders.
The Estonian Minister of the Interior said that the agreement is meant to ensure that such movements remain organized rather than chaotic. It establishes a framework enabling governments to act together during crises while maintaining the operational capacity of their states.
Yet the strategic implications go far beyond migration management.
Modern wars create simultaneous demands on infrastructure. Railways, ports, highways, and airports must move troops, equipment, humanitarian supplies, and civilians at the same time. Without coordination, these competing flows can paralyze transport systems.
That is why evacuation planning increasingly overlaps with military logistics.
Recent NATO exercises in northern Europe illustrate this convergence. During the Cold Response drills in the Arctic, civilian hospitals, transport operators, and local authorities practiced receiving casualties and managing civilian flows as part of wartime scenarios.
In one rehearsal linked to the exercise, simulated casualties from a hypothetical conflict in Finland were transported by rail through Sweden to Narvik in Norway, where civilian doctors and volunteers treated them alongside military medical teams.
Such scenarios demonstrate how civil and military systems are becoming inseparable during crisis planning.
Infrastructure must now function as a dual-use system. The same railway corridor that moves armored units toward the front may also carry evacuated civilians in the opposite direction. Ports receiving allied reinforcements may simultaneously serve as departure points for humanitarian transport.
This has financial consequences. Preparing for mass evacuation requires investments in transport capacity, digital registration systems, medical reception facilities, and border infrastructure. These capabilities remain largely invisible during peacetime but must scale up rapidly when a crisis strikes.
For the Baltic states, the stakes are particularly high. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania previously developed joint evacuation contingency plans among themselves before expanding cooperation to the broader Nordic-Baltic region through the new agreement.
Poland occupies a central role in this emerging geography. As NATO’s primary logistical hub connecting Western Europe with the eastern flank, Poland would likely serve both as a transit corridor for allied military forces and as a reception zone for civilians fleeing potential conflict areas further east.
Crucially, the deeper shift is psychological. For three decades, European integration was built on the expectation that intra-EU borders would gradually lose their strategic importance. The new security environment suggests the opposite.
Borders must now function as organized gateways capable of processing large movements of people under extreme pressure while keeping military logistics flowing. Evacuation planning may look like a technical exercise in crisis management. In reality, it reflects something larger. Europe is relearning that defending territory also means preparing societies to move.
Maciej Filip Bukowski is the Head of the Energy and Resilience Program at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in Warsaw. He is a non-resident fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), and writes about issues including Central European security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Ukraine 2036
How Today’s Investments Will Shape Tomorrow’s Security
CEPA Forum 2025
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
