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Poland aims to complete a border wall and seal its border with Belarus next summer, to stem the flow of migrants that Warsaw describes as war with Russia.
Additional infrastructure works on the 400km eastern border that Donald Tusk's government announced earlier this year are on track to be completed by mid-2025, said Maciej Duszczyk, Poland's deputy migration minister. Once verification is complete, “this will be as close to 100 percent security (margin) as possible,” he said.
Poland began building the border wall in late 2021, when the Belarusian government of President Alexander Lukashenko began facilitated the arrival of thousands of migrants to enter Poland and neighboring Baltic countries. Many of these migrants get subsidized flights and visas to fly from the Middle East and Africa to Moscow or Minsk before boarding a bus to the Polish border.
Tusk, who took office last year, has put the fight against Russia's “hybrid war” at the top of his agenda, including expanding and sending additional troops to a safe zone along the border with Belarus. His government is installing night vision and thermal cameras, building a new way around the border and strengthening the five-meter steel fence built by the previous government in 2022. Poland is spending more than 2.5bn zlotys (€587mn) to strengthen the border, half of which has been allocated by the Tusk government, Duszczyk said.
“This artificial migration route will be closed next summer, I hope and believe,” Duszczyk said. However, he said Warsaw should be prepared for another attempt by Lukashenko to “escalate the conflict” and damage Poland's strongholds.
Warsaw too asked EU partners to contribute funds in a separate military project called East Shield, which is described as part of Europe's defense against further Russian aggression. Tusk has put 10bn zlotys into this project which includes new air surveillance systems, anti-tank barriers and mines – 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 earlier this month said Brussels would give 170 million dollars to neighboring countries Russia and Belarus to fight “combined threats from Russia and Belarus in unacceptable migration tools”.
In the coming months, Warsaw will build a new access road to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which will allow Polish forces to react quickly to possible crimes, Duszczyk said.
But the decline in Polish migration has also drawn widespread criticism from non-governmental organisations, particularly after Tusk announced in October that Warsaw would temporarily suspend asylum to discourage those crossing from Belarus.
Duszczyk argued that Poland's tough stance was in line with Madrid's push for migrants who wanted to break the fences around Spain's North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla.
An EU country “can suspend the right to apply for asylum if this is done by a violent group that attacks the fence or border guards,” Duszczyk said. “Safety is more important than migration.”