The Polish government has announced that it will build a barbed wire barrier along its 200km northern land border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad (Koenigsberg in German). The objective is to defend the Polish border against a possible flow of immigrants or refugees, similar to the one induced in 2021 by the Belarusian regime.
The Polish Minister of Defense specified that the laying of the fence would begin immediately and that it would consist of placing a triple spiral of barbed wire 3 meters wide and 2.5 meters high, as well as electronic monitoring equipment and cameras throughout the border land travel.
In this way, the government is responding to the Kremlin's announcement that it wants to open the airspace over the enclave for planes from “friendly countries”. Poland fears that Russia is taking advantage of air traffic to Kaliningrad to bring immigrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East to the enclave and push them towards the border with Poland with the aim of destabilizing the neighboring country and thereby aggravating the problem of immigration to the Union European.
More than a year ago, neighboring Belarus undertook a similar deliberate action with thousands of immigrants from Iraq, Syria and Asia, brought in chartered planes from Turkey whom the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Moscow, was transporting to the Polish border, forcing them to then cross it.
Poland then declared a military emergency on the border strip and built a barbed wire barrier of more than 180 kilometers to stop the migratory flow. Many refugees and immigrants were intercepted by the Polish border guard and turned back unceremoniously, often brutally. Many died. The EU then accused Belarus of unleashing a "hybrid war" against Europe.
The Polish opposition, as well as volunteers and civil activists, went to Poland's northeast border with Belarus to help stranded immigrants and accused the Polish nationalist government of violating international treaties that establish that once they set foot on Polish territory they have the right to request asylum or refugee status. Activists and journalists who went to the border were intercepted, detained, mistreated and prosecuted.
The Minister of Defense has today ridiculed that civic and humanitarian way of helping refugees used as a throwing weapon by governments. "I hope that this time the opposition and celebrities will refrain from organizing pizza catering tours and stop harassing our soldiers and border guards," he told a news conference in Warsaw. "We care about the security of our country," he added.
The Polish government thinks that Russia will want to repeat the operation of forcing thousands of migrants to cross the Polish border in the extreme north-east of the eastern flank of the EU in order to aggravate the economic problems and the humanitarian crisis in the EU in retaliation for the sanctions. imposed after their invasion of the Ukraine.
The government has sent the first sappers to the border today, Wednesday, and wants to finish the construction of more than 200 km of barrier by the end of November.
