By Galina Korol | 2024-07-11

KYIV -- "Constant provocations" along Poland's border with Belarus have prompted Warsaw to boost its military presence and defense fortifications, Deputy Minister of Defense Cezary Tomczyk told reporters on July 10, according to AFP.

"Everyone is aware of how dangerous the situation is; I'm thinking of the Ukraine war and what the Russian Federation is doing," he told reporters.

Almost 6,000 Polish troops guard the borders with Belarus and Russia, but the government plans to increase that number "up to 17,000 -- 8,000 on site and 9,000 in the reserve," said Gen. Wieslaw Kukula, Polish military chief of staff.

He said the "rapid border reaction force" would be deployment-ready "within 48 hours" to support border guards and prevent potential "surprises" from Moscow and Minsk.

The troops would also contribute to new defense infrastructure built as part of Poland's "East Shield" plan to beef up border security.

The program's goals will be attained by 2028, said Tomczyk.

Letter to the EU

Late last month, the leaders of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia wrote to the European Union (EU) requesting help building a line of defense along the border with Russia and Belarus.

They urged the 27-nation EU to "spend more and coordinate on defense initiatives within the EU and with NATO."

"Building a defense infrastructure system along the EU external border with Russia and Belarus will address the dire and urgent need to secure the EU from military and hybrid threats," said the letter, seen by AFP on June 27.

"The scale and costs of this joint endeavor require a dedicated EU action to support it both politically and financially," it said.

The four EU members are staunch critics of Moscow, whom they accuse of orchestrating hybrid attacks including "intimidation, instrumentalization of migrants, sabotage, disinformation, foreign information manipulation and interference, [and] cyber-attacks."

Poland and the Baltic states -- which all have borders with Russia -- have already begun fortifying their eastern borders.

Warsaw has earmarked more than €2.3 billion ($2.5 billion) for defense measures along the border.

"Security on the Belarus-Poland border is a long-term issue, and at this point building a line of defense on the border is absolutely necessary," Oleg Zhdanov, military analyst and reservist colonel on the Ukrainian military general staff, told Kontur.

The Polish Ministry of National Defense in late May shared information on the border fortifications expected to be built as part of East Shield.

According to photos published May 27 by the website Onet, Poland anticipates installing concrete antitank obstacles, defense lines with concrete blocks and in some sections minefields.

"The Poles are absolutely right to fence themselves off like this because you can no longer expect anything but trouble from [Belarus]," said Ivan Stupak, a former officer in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and an analyst at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future.

"What would be even better would be to cut off all communication with Belarus and create a buffer zone in order to quickly identify violators," he told Kontur.

Manufactured migration crisis

Russia's war against Ukraine is now in its third year, and the Kremlin has been ratcheting up its hybrid operations against the West.

In the past few months, Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka's regime has orchestrated a new phase in the large-scale migration crisis on the border between Belarus and its neighbors to the west, according to Belsat TV, an independent Belarusian television channel that broadcasts from Poland.

In particular, there has been an uptick in attempts to illegally cross the Belarus-Poland border. May alone saw 7,000 attempted border crossings.

"Poland's law enforcement agencies say that it's not just the number of migrants trying to cross the border that's rising but also their aggressiveness," Belsat reported June 26. "There have been a number of cases of migrants attacking and wounding Polish soldiers."

Polish media outlets reported May 28 that one migrant who had tried to illegally cross into Poland from Belarus had attacked a Polish soldier who later died in hospital.

"All of this is Belarus's doing, and it's being done under Russia's guidance and at its initiative," Stupak said. "Russia's goal is to use migrants to stoke tension in the [EU]."

The migrant problem is being manufactured by the Russian and Belarusian intelligence agencies, say analysts.

"This is being done to infuriate Poland and put pressure on the EU and NATO and say to them, if you don't agree to what Russia and Belarus want, there will be a crisis and you'll have problems," Zhdanov said. "And now these problems are being created."

The crisis is meant to destabilize Poland, agreed Łukasz Jasina, a historian, analyst and former spokesman for the Polish Foreign Ministry.

"Belarus's policies are directed at weakening Poland and attacking our eastern border and turning it into a new hybrid front in the war that continues to rage in Ukraine," he told Kontur.

Poland mulls closing border

Construction of barriers on Poland's eastern border is in full swing and there are also troops and tanks there, said Jasina.

"Here in Poland we can do everything in our power -- build a wall on the border, send our troops and police officers out, get backing from the other NATO and EU countries -- but if Alyaksandr Lukashenka sends these people who are arriving in Belarus from many countries, that's always going to happen, and it will be impossible to stop it completely without a policy change in the Belarusian government," he said.

Shutting the border could influence Belarus's policies, and the Polish government has been examining this possibility for over a year, Jasina said.

Exercising that option "amounts to closing the Belarusian economy since everything happens from east to west through Brest [a Belarusian border city] and other places," he said.

Amid this latest flare-up of the migrant crisis, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski hinted at the possibility of closing the border with Belarus.

"We still have functioning border crossings. Right now we're taking a look at what the consequences will be for our economy [of shutting them down]," he told the Polish outlet TVN24 June 22.