Moscow’s hybrid war
Belarus and Russia are sending more migrants again
16.06.2024, 12:16
Despite increased border controls, since the beginning of the year thousands of migrants have again been trying to enter Poland from Belarus – significantly more than a year ago. “We have information that this is increasing again,” the German police also say.
On a Saturday afternoon in mid-May, two Syrians and two Egyptians attract attention in the small town of Schwennenz. A few hours later, three Syrians are standing on a bike path near Neu Grambow. Seven of 30 men that the Federal Police Inspectorate Pasewalk in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania arrested along the border with Poland in a single weekend. What they all had in common: They came via the so-called Belarus route.
After a decline in the winter, the number of illegal entries via this route is rising again. Poland and the European Union accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin and his ally, Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko, of deliberately helping people from the Middle East and other crisis regions to enter the EU illegally by providing visas and logistics.
This began in 2021. The route leads from Belarus across the EU’s external border to Poland: there, the Polish border guards have registered 16,500 attempts at irregular crossing since the beginning of the year. In the same period in 2023, there were 11,200 such attempts.
Hundreds are moving to Germany
Once people are in the EU, many move on to Germany. Here, too, the curve is pointing upwards: the Federal Police registered just 26 people in January and 25 in February who had entered the country illegally via this route. In March, the number was 412, and in April 861. In May, the preliminary statistics recorded 891 illegal entries via the Belarus route. From the beginning of the year to May 30, there were 2,215. Of these, 1,021 were in Brandenburg, 867 in Saxony and 327 in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
“We also know from our contact points in other countries that this route is being considered more and more by the smuggling organizations,” says Andreas Roßkopf, the head of the police union responsible for the federal police. “We have information that this is increasing again. However, there has not been a blatant increase so far.” And compared to last year, the numbers are significantly lower: by the end of May 2023, the federal police had already identified a good 6,000 illegal entries on the Belarus route, as the media service Integration breaks down in a graphic.
Nevertheless, people in Berlin are concerned. “Moscow and Minsk are clearly conducting hybrid warfare by deliberately luring people from crisis countries and smuggling them into the EU,” CDU politician Thorsten Frei recently warned.
Poland again with exclusion zone
In Poland, the situation on the border with Belarus has been escalating again for a few weeks. Not only is the number of migrants attempting to cross the EU’s external border, which is now heavily secured, irregularly increasing. Aggression is also increasing. At the beginning of June, a 21-year-old soldier died after being seriously injured by a migrant with a knife while on duty at the border. “Almost every day, border guards observe aggressive behavior from migrants,” says border guard spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Andrzej Juzwiak. “They throw stones, branches and burning twigs, shoot with slingshots or attack Polish patrols with knives or broken bottles.”
In response to the fatal knife attack, Poland has now returned to a controversial measure that the national conservative PiS government had once devised: there is once again a restricted zone along 60 kilometers of the 418-kilometer-long border. It extends 200 meters, and in some places up to two kilometers, deep into the country. Unlike in the PiS era, journalists and aid organizations will be allowed access to this area – if they apply for permission.
In its tough stance on migration, Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s center-left coalition, which has been in office since December, differs little from its national conservative predecessors. After the situation escalated in autumn 2021, the PiS government secured the border with Belarus with a 5.5-meter-high fence and an electronic surveillance system and sent massive numbers of soldiers to the region.
Tusk: Operation to “destabilize the state”
Tusk and his foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, also speak of a hybrid attack, which they suspect the Kremlin is behind. “We are not dealing with asylum seekers here, but with an organized, very efficient operation to break through the Polish border and try to destabilize the state,” said Tusk during a visit to the border. According to Sikorski, 90 percent of the migrants have Russian visas.
The German police union member Roßkopf sees the Polish border guards in a tight spot. The border with Lithuania and Belarus is about “jungle-like areas”, partly swampy, partly overgrown. “It is very, very difficult for Poland to monitor this border completely.” This probably means that if Russia and Belarus try to further revitalize the route, it would cause a lot of headaches – first in Poland, but then also in Germany.
This year there is still a smaller overall “migration movement” across Eastern Europe than recently, says Roßkopf. This is shown by the total figures at the eastern borders, which include not only the Belarus route, but all migration routes: In the first five months, the federal police registered a total of 10,875 illegal entries at the German-Polish and German-Czech borders, compared to 12,556 in the same period in 2023. Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser of the SPD and the Brandenburg state government praise the effect of the stationary border controls introduced in October. Roßkopf was always skeptical and is not convinced now either: “I stick to it, it is a misconception that people who are professionally smuggled cross the border at exactly the places where we have been checking for years.” Undercover surveillance along the border is much more effective.
Many migrants do not give up
“A not insignificant number of them come to us a second or third time,” says the union representative. The legal situation has not changed anyway: If someone entering Germany asks for protection, they are registered for further processing and initially accommodated.
What Roßkopf does admit, however, is that since the German border controls began, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have apparently been keeping their eastern borders tighter, in addition to Poland. Such a domino effect has indeed occurred, he says. But these controls are being scaled back again. The effort involved is simply very high – just like in Germany.