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Poland aims to complete a border wall and seal off its border with Belarus by next summer, in order to stop an influx of migrants Warsaw describes as Russia’s hybrid war.
The additional infrastructure works along its 400km eastern border that the government of Donald Tusk announced earlier this year are on track to be completed by mid-2025, said Maciej Duszczyk, Poland’s deputy minister for migration. Once the reinforcements are complete, “this will be as close to 100 per cent [border] security as is possible,” he said.
Poland started building a border wall in late 2021, when the Belarus regime of President Alexander Lukashenko first facilitated the arrival of thousands of migrants to enter Poland and neighbouring Baltic states. Many of these migrants received sponsored flights and visas to fly 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 war” at the top of his agenda, including extending and sending more troops to a buffer zone along the border with Belarus. His government is installing night vision and thermal cameras, building a new road to patrol the border and reinforcing the five-metre high steel fence that the previous government built in 2022. Poland is spending more than 2.5bn zlotys (€587mn) to reinforce the border, half of which is allocated by the Tusk government, Duszczyk said.
“This artificially created migration route will be closed during next summer, I hope and believe it,” Duszczyk said. Still, he said that Warsaw needed to be ready for another attempt by Lukashenko to “escalate the conflict” and sabotage Poland’s reinforced border infrastructure.
Warsaw has also called on EU partners to contribute financially to a separate military project called the East Shield, billed as part of Europe’s own defences against further Russian aggression. Tusk has earmarked 10bn zlotys for this project which includes new air surveillance systems, anti-tank barriers and ditches — drawn from a Polish defence budget that is set to reach 4.7 per cent of GDP next year, the highest in Nato.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen earlier this month said Brussels would give €170mn to countries neighbouring Russia and Belarus in order to counter “hybrid threats from Russia’s and Belarus’s unacceptable weaponisation of migration”.
In coming months, Warsaw will also build a new road to reach the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which will allow Polish troops to react faster to possible security breaches, Duszczyk said.
But Poland’s migration clampdown has also drawn strong criticism from non-government organisations, particularly after Tusk announced in October that Warsaw would temporarily suspend the right to asylum to discourage those crossing from Belarus.
Duszczyk argued that Poland’s tough stance was in line with Madrid’s in pushing back migrants who sought to breach fences around Spain’s North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.
An EU country “can suspend the rights for an application for asylum if this is done by an aggressive group who attacks the fence or the border guards,” Duszczyk said. “Security is more important than migration.”
