Poland To Reorganise Border Protection Forces, Lukashenko Wants To ‘Regulate’ Relations With Warsaw

The Polish government will create special border guard units to prevent illegal crossings from Belarus and will set up a new border protection component within the country’s Territorial Defence Force, a deputy interior minister has said. Czeslaw Mroczek announced the new measures at a press conference in Warsaw on Wednesday.

“Within the Border Guard we’re creating special units modelled on the prevention units of the police, which will be specially prepared to handle attempts of illegal border crossings and aggressive crowds wielding dangerous items,” Mroczek said.

In late May, a Polish soldier was stabbed with a knife mounted on a stick as a crowd of migrants gathered on the Belarusian side of the border fence, trying to force their way into Poland.

“We’ll be making consistent steps towards containment of the illegal migration route from Belarus to Poland,” Mroczek said. “We’re aware that this route has been organised by the criminal world with the support of Russian and Belarusian services, but we are successfully catching the criminals who are carrying out this task.”

Mroczek said that last year Poland detained 600 “smugglers involved in collecting people from the Polish border and transporting them further west.” According to him, this year the number has already reached 400.

Additionally, the voluntary Territorial Defence Force will have a new unit specialising in border protection, Mroczek said.

“The head of General Staff, General Wieslaw Kukula and deputy (Defence – PAP) Minister Cezary Tomczyk have announced that a border protection component will be created within the Territorial Defence Force,” Mroczek said. (PAP)

Lukashenko Says He Wants To ‘Regulate’ Relations With Poland

Lukashenko made the announcement at a meeting with graduates of military universities, held in Minsk on Tuesday. 

Therefore, he argued, Belarus must remain vigilant and ready to defend itself in the north-western and western directions.

Poland has seen increasing illegal migration attempts at its border with Belarus since 2021, when Lukashenko, decided to retaliate for EU sanctions on Minsk by mounting migration pressure on the EU. To this end, Belarus invited thousands of migrants to the country under a false promise of easy access to the EU across the Polish and Lithuanian borders.

On Monday, the Belarusian foreign minister, Maksim Ryzhenkov, said that Belarus was ready for dialogue with Poland over the migration problem at the border between the two countries. But, he added, Poland had not reacted to the Belarusian proposal but instead started to “make political demands,” which Minsk considers “unacceptable.”

The Belarusian independent website Nasha Niva wrote that the possible suspension of the flow of goods across the border with Poland is “the main instrument of pressure from Poland on the Belarusian authorities”. According to the website, Poland is trying to stop the migration crisis on the border and bring about the release of Polish minority activist and journalist Andrzej Poczobut imprisoned in Belarus.

Nasha Niva also wrote that the issue of border tensions had been raised by Polish President Andrzej Duda during his recent visit to China. Later Poland sent a signal to Belarus in the form of extremely thorough checks at the Malaszewicze terminal at the border with Belarus, which is important especially for the transport of Chinese goods. 

JD/MF