The tension between Belarus, Russia’s main ally in Europe, and its EU and NATO neighbors is only growing. Poland decided yesterday to send additional troops to its border with Belarus due to the increase in attempts to cross it illegally. Warsaw believes that the former Soviet country could try to create a migration crisis like the one in 2021, while Minsk and Moscow maintain that it is Poland that is artificially aggravating the situation.
The Polish border service asked a few days ago to send an additional thousand soldiers to the border. “Due to the dynamic situation on the Polish-Belarusian border, the Ministry of Defense has ordered that the request be fulfilled and that additional soldiers be assigned to patrol the border,” this department said yesterday, quoted by the PAP news agency.
The situation in this region of Europe has been red hot for several years due to migratory pressure and Russian intervention in Ukraine. The decibels have increased with the arrival in Belarus of the mercenaries of the Wagner Group, expelled from Russia after the armed rebellion in June.
At the end of July, Warsaw noted the transfer of more than one hundred Wagnerites to the Suwalki corridor, a rather small strip of territory (less than one hundred kilometers long), but of greater geostrategic importance, since it separates Poland from Lithuania and is next to to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, another area of ??tension for Warsaw and Vilnius. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said it was an attempt to create instability on NATO’s eastern flank.
But both Belarus and Russia have denied the accusation. “Not one hundred-strong detachment from the Wagner private military company has moved there. And if it did, it was only to pass on combat experience to the (Belarusian) brigades in Brest and Grodno,” Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said.
On August 1, the Polish Ministry of Defense reported that two Belarusian helicopters had violated its border. Minsk assured that the accusation by its neighbors had been hasty, made in order to “justify another accumulation of forces and means near the Belarusian border.” The Belarusian Foreign Ministry summoned Poland’s acting chargé d’affaires to reassure him that this was not true and noted that “the detente of the already difficult situation in bilateral relations is only possible with respectful and constructive dialogue.”
Moscow, for its part, accused Warsaw of intentionally “increasing tension”. “Poles tend to provoke these situations to increase tension. It is not a new line of action, but has been progressing in recent years,” Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov said on August 4.
Commenting on the information about Wagner’s movements in Belarusian territory, Peskov recalled that the mercenaries are in Belarus after an agreement between Moscow and Minsk. “Near or far from the border, this is the territory of Belarus, and Belarus is a sovereign state,” he stressed.
Nothing indicates that anything is going to change soon in this area. Before the contrary. Just yesterday the Belarusian army carried out target practice at the Gozhski firing range, in the Grodno region, close to the Suwalki corridor. The Ministry of Defense reported that in these military exercises “a situation as close as possible to a real combat situation was recreated” and “the experience of the special military operation” of Russia in Ukraine was used, such as the use of drones.
