Wednesday November 10, 2021
“Stand by your side in solidarity”
Austria wants to help Poland on the border
Austria’s Interior Minister Nehammer calls for EU aid to secure the border with Belarus and at the same time offers Poland support from Vienna. Apparently, Austria can even envision an on-site deployment.
In view of the influx of thousands of migrants on the Polish border with Belarus, Austria has offered Poland help with border protection. Vienna will “stand by Warsaw’s side in solidarity,” said Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer of “Welt”. “Just as we have secured the EU’s external border in Greece and Lithuania, we also offer our support to Poland.”
Like Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer from the CSU, Nehammer also called on the EU Commission to give the government in Warsaw more support in protecting the border. “The EU Commission must support Poland in securing the EU’s external border and provide the necessary funds for the erection of a robust border fence.” To offer help with the registration of migrants, however, is “the completely wrong signal”. Despite demands from the government in Warsaw, the EU has so far refused to co-finance a fence on the more than 400-kilometer border between Belarus and Poland.
According to the “Welt” report, Austria had temporarily made available Cobra special forces, drones, armored vehicles, night vision devices and thermal imaging technology for border security in the spring of 2020 to Greece and in the summer of this year to Lithuania.
The EU accuses Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko of deliberately smuggling migrants from the Middle East into the EU states of Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in order to retaliate against the sanctions adopted by Brussels. SPD Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas threatened Lukashenko in the refugee dispute on Wednesday night with an expansion and tightening of EU sanctions. In the Belarusian-Polish border area, thousands of migrants are currently stuck in low temperatures.