Poland-Belarus Border Barrier
Poland has started the construction of fortification structures on its border with Russia and Belarus as part of the large-scale project East Shield. This was announced 01 November 2024 by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on the social media platform X. “Construction of East Shield has begun! The first works are being carried out near the border with Russia,” Tusk wrote and shared a photo showing excavators digging trenches.
Warsaw plans to build 700 kilometers of fortifications, detection and warning systems, forward bases, logistics hubs, and counter-drone systems on the borders with Russia and Belarus by 2028 as part of the East Shield project. The cost of implementing this project is estimated at 10 billion zlotys (over 2.5 billion USD). In an interview with Ukrinform, the temporary chargé d’affaires of Poland in Ukraine, Piotr Lukasiewicz, noted that the East Shield project is intended to protect against invasions from Russia and Belarus and is based on Ukrainian experience.
In 2022, Poland built a 5.5-meter high and 186-kilometer long barrier along its border with Belarus and installed a modern electronic monitoring system. This was a response to the artificial migration pressure created by Belarus and Russia at the border with Poland and the Baltic States since the summer of 2021.
The lower house of the Polish parliament on 14 October 2021 voted in favor of a government plan to spend some $400 million on erecting a wall on Poland's border with Belarus in a bid to curb the influx of migrants trying to cross. The act establishing a barrier against migrants on the border of Poland and Belarus as a matter of urgency was endorsed by representatives of PiS, PSL, Confederation, the Agreement, Kukiz'15, Polish Affairs, and non-attached MPs. MPs from the Civic Coalition, Left, Poland 2050, and an MP from the German minority voted against the act. Warsaw had already deployed nearly 6,000 Polish soldiers to guard the border with Belarus amid the ongoing migration crisis, Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said on 19 October 2021.
Kacper Kepinski from the trade magazine "Architektura i Biznes" points out that the fence or the wall is "an infrastructure of exclusion that closes the country of" Solidarity "to people who are used in the current political struggle." In his opinion, the dam on the border is a violent solution that leaves its mark not only on people, but also on animals and the landscape . - "It is a symbol of the powerlessness of a stronger state and the entire European Union against a still small group of migrants" - believes Kepinski.
The government adopted a bill to construct a "permanent barrier" along Poland's eastern border with Belarus amid what officials said was a growing migrant surge. The lower house of parliament approved those plans in a 274-174 vote with one abstention. The measure went to the Senate, the upper house of Poland's parliament, for further debate. The wall is expected to cost PLN 1.6 billion (EUR, 350 million, USD 410 million) and take months to build, according to officials.
The barrier structure made of concrete and metal on the Polish-Belarusian border is a massive main wall. The foundation is equipped with protection against undermining. Every five or six meters, four-meter piles filled with reinforcement and concrete are installed into the ground, between them - concrete slabs are dug to a depth of about a meter. The above-ground part of the foundation is about half a meter. Above - metal spans five meters high.
The border barrier announced by the PiS government is to be much higher than the current 2.5 meter tall fence and resemble a wall on the Greek-Turkish border. The Greek-Turkish wall is 5 meters high and stretches for 40 kilometers. Its construction cost EUR 63 million, or PLN 288 million. The act introduced as a matter of urgency assumed that the provisions of the construction law, water law, and environmental law will not be applied during construction. The act also provides for the possibility of expropriating citizens of real estate necessary to build a barrier.
Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski said that the Polish border service "has been dealing with increasing migrant pressures" on the border with Belarus for several months. "Despite the deployment of additional personnel and assistance from soldiers and police, as well as the use of temporary installations, we have not seen a decrease in the number of attempts to cross the Polish-Belarusian border," Kaminski said.
Since August 2021, the Polish Border Guard had frustrated over 10,000 attempts to illegally cross the Polish-Belarusian border, and 1,500 people were arrested in the interior of the country and taken to centers for foreigners. In September 2021 alone, there were 7,535 attempts to cross the border.
"Therefore, urgent measures need to be taken to build a solid, high wall, equipped with a monitoring and movement detection system," he told reporters, adding that "such border security measures have worked for other countries and have proven to be an effective solution in the fight against illegal migration." Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak told public broadcaster Polish Radio that Poland would draw on the experience of Hungary, which constructed a permanent wall on its border with Serbia during a migrant crisis in 2015.
Poland and the Baltic states accused Belarus' strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko of organising a wave of illegal migrants seeking to enter the bloc as part of what officials have called a "hybrid war." The EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, visited Poland in late September 2021, agreeing with Warsaw’s arguments that “firm steps” were needed against Belarus, according to officials. Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said his country enjoyed full support within the European Union as it worked to defend itself against a migrant influx and a "hybrid war" being waged by Belarus.
In late September 2021, Polish lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to extend a state of emergency in parts of two regions along the country's eastern border with Belarus by two months amid a growing migrant surge. The state of emergency gives authorities broader powers to monitor and control the movement of people on the Polish-Belarusian border, which is also the eastern border of the European Union.
On 24 August 2021 Poland said it will build a new fence along its border with Belarus to help deal with a surge in illegal migration that officials said had been orchestrated by strongman Alexander Lukashenko. “This week, work will begin on the construction of a fence on the Polish-Belarusian border; it will be made of barbed wire and will be 2.5 meters high,” Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said. “We are dealing with a hybrid war, and an attack on Poland. This is an attempt to create a migration crisis,” Blaszczak said, and added that the country would soon step up the number of soldiers on the border to 2,000.
On 25 August 2021, at the request of the Lithuanian government, the North Atlantic Council agreed to send a small team of experts led by NATO - the Counter Hybrid Support Team - to support Lithuania in the face of hybrid operations along the border with Belarus. It is specific NATO support for Lithuania and a demonstration of allied solidarity in action.
Poland began building the barbed wire fence despite criticism that some migrants were being treated inhumanely. The fence is made of razor wire and is 2.5 m high. There are three-layer entanglements under the fence. "At the very beginning, we will secure the section which is the easiest to illegally pass and the more difficult to supervise - that is, the land section. From our 418 km Belarus border it is about 180-190 km. We start with this", said Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. On 17 September 2021, Poland completed the construction of a fence along the entire length of its border with Belarus. Previously there was no no-man's land area on the Polish-Belarusian border, only posts pointing to the border separating Poland from Belarus.
"Despite the fact that the Polish-Belarusian section of the state border has been set up with barbed wire and a concertina-type wire fence, the number of attempts to cross the border is not decreasing, but is growing," said the justification of the bill for the wall posted on the parliament's website. From the start of January till the end of September, it said, the Border Guard prevented 9,287 attempts to cross the frontier from Belarus into Poland, and of those around 8,000 took place in the last two months alone. "Due to the fact that the situation may carry on for many months longer we need to take protective measures," said government spokesman Piotr Muller.
In Germany, the federal police said that the number of people entering the country after following the Belarus-Poland route had risen above 4,300 since August 2021, against just 26 registered in the period from January to July 2021. "There are currently no signs of an easing of the situation on the German-Polish border," the police said, adding that they had stepped up internal border searches and reintroduced temporary frontier controls.
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, stated 24 September 2021 “We urge the Polish government to make an individual assessment of each case before expelling these people or preventing them from entering the territory of the Republic of Poland. Under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, to which Poland is a signatory, asylum seekers should not be punished for crossing the border illegally, ”said Goyer. "All states have the right to manage their borders in accordance with international law, but on condition that human rights, including the right to asylum, are respected."
Deputy PM and Minister for Security Affairs Jaroslaw Kaczynski reassured 07 October 2021 during press conference at the Border Guard branch in Bialystok that there is no pressure of refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border, but only economic immigrants brought there by the Lukashenka authorities. According to Deputy Prime Minister Kaczynski, economic immigrants are brought to the borders with Poland as part of the action organized by the Belarusian authorities with the unquestionable consent of the Russian Federation. "There is a kilometer wide border zone in Belarus, very closely guarded, to which ordinary Belarusian citizens have no access, and the fact that these migrants are admitted there is proof of the actions of the Belarusian authorities," believes the PiS chairman.
"They are not allowed in to be at the border crossing points, but to camp near the border line," he said. He also stressed that the Belarusian services “are present there” and “completely tolerate it”. “These people are then led to places where there is a chance of crossing the border. It happens that Belarusian officials personally participate in overcoming barriers and cutting wires, ”the PiS president presented the situation on the border.
According to him, this is the result of the actions of the President of Belarus, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. “Everything is a cynical and brutal action by the services directly led by President Lukashenka. It is an action planned many months ago as a retaliation for supporting the Belarusian opposition and an attempt to put pressure on Poland and the EU to withdraw from sanctions that are difficult for the Belarusian regime", stressed the chairman of the Committee for National Security and Defense Affairs.
On 08 October 2021, Kaczynski took a trip to eastern Poland to personally examine the situation in the border area. During his visit, the head of Poland’s ruling party pledged to build a "very serious, impenetrable wall". Kaczynski claimed that the precise type of the barrier and the companies that will be contracted to build it have already been selected. The technology-packed wall is supposed to be more durable and harder to cross than the current 130-kilometer long fence. It will stand along Poland’s border with Belarus, serving as an additional barrier to the natural boundary formed by the Bug river.
Poland, along with Latvia and Lithuania, reported a drastic increase in migrants from countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq illegally crossing their borders from Belarus. The EU has accused Minsk of waging a hybrid warfare in a bid to pressure Brussels over anti-Belarus sanctions, a claim the Alexander Lukashenko government rejected.
The European Union will not fund creating fences or walls at external borders of member states, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on 22 October 2021. "There was a discussion on what is so called psychical infrastructure and I was very clear in the Commission and the EU parliament that there will be no funding for barbed wire and walls," von der Leyen told a press conference following the EU leader’s summit. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said that the EU should discuss creating a physical fence on the border with Belarus amid the influx of migrants.
By mid-November 2021 reports from the border between Poland and Belarus were becoming more and more tragic. On Saturday, Polish TV station TVN reported that about a hundred people had tried to cross the border at the same place at the same time, but that their attempts had been stopped. It said that Ukrainian and Polish human traffickers planning to drive migrants to Germany had been arrested. The daily situation reports from the Polish border police have sounded very similar for months. The government has deployed additional police and army units and erected a temporary barbed wire fence. According to Polish sources, there were some 4,000 people stranded in the area. They are mainly from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and frequently try to cross the border.
On 13 November 2021, Polish President Andrzej Duda paid a visit to troops stationed on the border and thanked them for their defense of Poland and the EU. In Poland, the political debate is rather heated than. All the parties are in agreement that Lukashenko is to blame, but they disagree on the approach to take. Many opposition politicians do not understand the government's refusal to accept help from the European Union to secure the borders. The head of the ruling Law and Justice party PiS, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is seeking support elsewhere: He has invited former Italian interior minister and leader of the populist Lega Nord Matteo Salvini and other far-right politicians to talks in Warsaw in December on "defending Europe's borders." Though it was hard to tell what will happen, what was certain is that the state of emergency in Poland was due to end on December 2 and cannot be extended for constitutional reasons. Will martial law be imposed instead? Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said no.
In late January 2022 Polish contractors began work on the 353 million euro ($407m) wall along the Belarus border aimed at deterring refugee crossings following a crisis in the area in 2021. The 5.5-metre-high wall will run along 186km (115 miles) of the border – almost half the total length – and is to be completed in June 2022. The construction raised human rights concerns over how refugees will be able to seek asylum as well as environmental worries about the effect on wildlife along the mostly forested border. While the number of crossings had fallen sharply, some still attempted the increasingly perilous crossing despite the freezing conditions.
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