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Poland aims to complete the construction of a border wall and close its borders with Belarus by next summer, in order to stop the flow of migrants, which Warsaw describes as the hybrid war that Russia is waging.
Maciej Duszczyk, Poland's deputy immigration minister, said additional infrastructure work along its 400-kilometre eastern border that Donald Tusk's government announced earlier this year was on track to be completed by mid-2025. He added that once the reinforcements are complete, “it will be “This is as close to 100 percent (border) security as possible.”
Poland began building a border wall in late 2021, when Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko's regime first ruled. Facilitated access Thousands of migrants enter Poland and neighboring Baltic states. Many of these migrants were given subsidized flights and visas to travel from the Middle East and Africa to Moscow or Minsk before being bussed to the Polish border.
Tusk, who took office a year ago, has put the fight against Russia's “hybrid warfare” high on his agenda, including expanding and sending more troops into a buffer zone along the border with Belarus. His government is installing night vision and thermal cameras, building a new road to guard the border and strengthening the five-metre-high steel fence built by the previous government in 2022. Poland is spending more than 2.5 billion zlotys (587 million euros) to reinforce the steel fence. The border, half of which was allocated by the Tusk government, Duszczyk said.
“This artificially created migration route will be closed next summer, I hope and believe it,” Duszczyk said. However, he said Warsaw needed to be prepared for another attempt by Lukashenko to “escalate the conflict” and sabotage Poland's beefed-up border infrastructure.
Warsaw has it too He called on European Union partners to contribute financially to a separate military project called Eastern Shield, which has been described as part of Europe's own defenses against further Russian aggression. Tusk has allocated 10 billion zlotys for the project – which includes new air surveillance systems, anti-tank barriers and trenches – taken from Poland's defense budget which is set to reach 4.7 percent of GDP next year, the highest in NATO.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said earlier this month that Brussels would give 170 million euros to countries neighboring Russia and Belarus in order to counter “hybrid threats caused by Russia and Belarus's unacceptable weaponization of migration.”
In the coming months, Warsaw will also build a new road to reach the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which will allow Polish forces to respond faster to potential security breaches, Duszczyk said.
But Poland's anti-immigration campaign has also drawn strong criticism from NGOs, especially after Tusk announced in October that Warsaw would temporarily suspend asylum to discourage those crossing from Belarus.
Duszczyk said Poland's tough stance was in line with Madrid's in pushing back migrants who sought to breach the fence around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa.
Duszczyk said an EU country “can suspend asylum seeker rights if this is done by an aggressive group attacking the fence or border guards.” “Security is more important than immigration.”
