Poland Starts Building Fence on Border With Russia

Piotr Skolimowski and Maciej Onoszko
·2 min read
25

(Bloomberg) -- Poland started building a barbed-wire fence on its 210-kilometer (130-mile) border with Russia’s Kaliningrad region to prevent the Kremlin from sending asylum-seekers into the country, Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said.

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With the airport in Kaliningrad open to flights from North Africa and the Middle East, Poland sees the risk of another migration crisis, similar to what happened with Belarus last year, he told reporters in north-eastern Poland, near the border with the Russian exclave. The barrier will be 2 1/2 meters tall (8 feet), with three layers of concertina wire, and work will start as early as Wednesday, according to the minister.

“We want the border to be tight,” said Blaszczak, who is also a deputy prime minister. “We use the experience gained last year, because there is no doubt that this barrier, this temporary barrier protected the Polish-Belarusian border and prevented a hybrid attack from Belarusian territory.”

Poland earlier this year completed a wall on its border with Belarus after it accused the Kremlin of masterminding the artificial flow of thousands of people from countries including Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan in 2021. Neighboring countries in the Baltics also had refugees flood in at the time. The surge was designed to destabilize Poland and prevent it from supporting Ukraine, Blaszczak told the news conference.

Right groups have slammed Poland for its handling of the migration crisis with Belarus. Reporters Without Borders, a non-governmental organization, also criticized the authorities for what it described as violent arrests of several journalists after the media outlets were banned from the border.

(An earlier version of this story was corrected the spelling of the minister’s last name.)

(Updates with comments from Blaszczak in third paragraph.)

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