The tension between Belarus, Russia’s main ally in Europe, and its EU and NATO neighbors is only increasing. Poland decided yesterday to send additional troops to its border with Belarus in the face of increasing attempts to cross it illegally. Warsaw believes that the ex-Soviet country could try to create a migration crisis like the one in 2021, while Minsk and Moscow claim that it is Poland that is artificially exacerbating the situation.
The Polish border service requested a few days ago to send an additional 1,000 soldiers to the border. “Due to the dynamic situation on the border between Poland and Belarus, the Ministry of Defense has ordered that the request be accepted 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 delicate for several years due to migration 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 noticed the transfer of more than a hundred Wagnerites to the Suwalki Corridor, a rather small strip of territory (less than a hundred kilometers long), but of greater geostrategic importance, as it separates Poland from Lithuania and is next to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, another tension zone 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 rejected the accusation. “No detachment of one hundred people from the private military company Wagner has moved there. And in case he has moved there, it has only been to transmit combat experience to the (Belarusian) brigades in Brest and Grodno”, commented the Belarusian president, Aleksandr Lukashenko.
On August 1, the Polish Ministry of Defense reported that two Belarusian helicopters had violated its border. Minsk assured that the accusation of its neighbors had been hasty, to “justify another accumulation of forces and means near the Belarusian border”. The Belarusian Foreign Ministry summoned Poland’s interim chargé d’affaires to assure him that it was not true and pointed out that “detente of the already difficult situation in bilateral relations is only possible with respectful and constructive dialogue” .
Moscow, for its part, accused Warsaw of “increasing tension” on purpose. “The Poles tend to provoke these situations to increase the tension. It is not a new line of action, but it has been progressing in recent years”, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov 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 emphasized.
There is no indication that anything will change soon in this area. On the contrary. Just yesterday, the Belarusian army carried out shooting practice at the Gozhski 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” had been recreated and “the experience of the special military operation” of Russia in Ukraine had been used , such as the use of drones.
