EU should participate
Poland is expanding fortifications on its eastern border
May 11, 2024, 3:12 p.m
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A high fence with an electronic surveillance system has been protecting Poland’s border with Belarus for two years now. Poland is building bunkers and trenches on the border with Kaliningrad. According to Prime Minister Tusk, this is just the beginning of work on fortifying the entire eastern border.
Poland wants to strengthen its eastern border. Prime Minister Donald Tusk justified this with the pressure that the regime in neighboring Belarus is creating through organized migration and the growing danger from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. “We have started intensive work on a modern fortification to be built along the entire Polish eastern border,” Tusk told border guards and soldiers in Karakule on the Polish-Belarusian border. Since Poland’s eastern border is also the EU’s external border, the entire international community must invest in fortification.
As early as the summer of 2022, Poland secured the land sections of its 418-kilometer-long border with Belarus with a 5.5-meter-high fence and an electronic surveillance system. Poland’s Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz recently said his country would build bunkers and trenches on its border with Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
Tensions with Belarus are growing
The relationship between the EU and NATO country Poland and the authoritarian-ruled Belarus has been tense for a long time. Poland is one of the most important military supporters of Ukraine, which is attacked by Russia. Belarus is a close ally of Moscow. In addition, Poland and the EU accuse the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko of having been bringing migrants from crisis regions to the EU’s external border in an organized manner since 2021 in order to put pressure on the West.
Recently, tensions between the two countries had increased. At the beginning of the week, a Polish judge fled to Belarus and asked for asylum there. Since he also had access to secret documents, the Polish public prosecutor’s office is now investigating him on suspicion of working for a foreign secret service.
Shortly after the judge’s escape, Polish border guards in the border area with Belarus picked up a deserted Russian soldier who had previously been on combat duty in Ukraine. He had mingled with the migrants in civilian clothing in order to illegally cross the border into Poland with them.