Poland completes second stage of project to seal its border with Belarus

Poland has completed the second stage of its project to seal its border with Belarus, activating a 200km electronic barrier monitored by cameras and motion detectors.

A year after a crisis on the Polish-Belarus border, Poland says its project will be completed next year.

Interior minister Mariusz Kamiński described the barriers as “extremely important instruments to effectively counteract politically-motivated illegal migration aimed at destabilising the situation in the region”.

He said the clashes on the border a year ago, which saw people funnelled into the region by Belarusian police, were part of a “hybrid war” devised by Moscow and “orchestrated by the Belarusian regime”.

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“In fact it was an action preparing for war in Ukraine. A destabilising action in this part of Europe,” he added.

The new electronic border is one of the longest of it kind in the world and cost €73 million. A physical border wall – 5.5m high, 187km long and costing €320 million – was completed in June.

After a record 18,000 monthly crossings in October 2021, Poland’s border service noted a drop this year followed by a slow, steady rise in recent weeks. On any given day this month they detained between 100 and 200 migrants from Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq and Sri Lanka.

Regular border service bulletins report attempts by people attempting to scale the wall or dig tunnels underneath. Last week border guards rescued 10 people – an Indian, Pakistani and eight Sri Lankans – from a swamp in the area.

The service has also released videos it says show Belarusian border guards escorting migrants to the border while trying to hide their own faces from the camera.

“Belarusian officials are actively involved in organising the illegal crossing of the Polish-Belarusian border,” the Polish border service said in a statement, “bringing people who want to illegally enter European countries to the border.”

Grupa Granica, an NGO which helps migrants, said its activists had noted a rise in crossing attempts in the past month. It is a vocal critic of Poland’s approach on the Belarus border, and claims illegal pushbacks – expelling people before they can claim asylum – are now standard practice.

Its activists have documented cases of people being forced to cross rivers with strong currents, then being beaten on their return by Belarusian guards for “failing”.

Poland’s border service disputes these claims but concedes that 27 documented deaths have taken place at the border since September 2021. Grupa Granica says the real figure is far higher with at least 186 people missing in the border region.

Fearing an expansion of what it calls Russian-Belarusian “hybrid warfare” with asylum seekers, Poland has begun securing another of its borders – with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. The move comes after Polish media reports that the airport in Kaliningrad, tucked in between Lithuania and Poland, had signed agreements with airlines from Syria, Turkey and Belarus.

“This is an offshoot of the Russian aggression against Ukraine ... anyone who knows Russian doctrine knows that Ukraine is an intermediate stage,” said Krzysztof Sobolewski, general secretary of Poland’s ruling national conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party. “We showed that the assault from Belarus did not bring the results expected by Putin ... and we will do everything to make things stay that way.”

Kaliningrad hosts Russia’s Baltic Sea fleet as well as tens of thousands of troops, a military stronghold with an even greater strategic importance since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

As the war enters its 10th month, tensions in Poland are at a new high since stray Ukrainian rocket strikes last week in eastern Poland left two dead.

After the incident Germany offered Poland a missile defence system to help defend its air space. According to Polish defence minister Mariusz Blaszczak, Germany has agreed to deploy the Patriot launcher at Poland’s border with Ukraine. “The version of the system has yet to be determined, as does how quickly they will reach us and how long they will be stationed,” Mr Blaszczak said on Twitter.

Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuri Ignat said he hoped the German Patriot system would be used to protect both Polish and Ukrainian skies. “We would like, at least in that part of the front, to protect our skies with this air defence system,” said Mr Ignat.