Poland will complete construction of border walls on the country’s borders with Russia and Belarus, the country’s border authorities announced on Thursday.
Border Guard spokeswoman Anna Michalska confirmed in Warsaw that construction of the border wall with Belarus will soon resume in the Bug River area, an area that was recently excluded from the barrier due to difficult terrain conditions.
According to Michalska, contractors will be selected before the end of the year to carry out this work, which will begin in 2024 and complete the more than 200 kilometer barrier along the border with Belarus.
Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski said in an interview with state television TVP on Wednesday that 5,500 surveillance cameras will be installed, some of which have night vision capabilities, as well as motion detectors “so that not even a mouse can get in.”
Kaminski also announced that “between the end of September and October, the construction of the electronic barrier on the border with Russia will be completed”, a project that will cost around 85 million euros.
In April, construction began on a barrier with three rows of wire fences, 3,000 surveillance cameras and about 200 kilometers of detection cables that will protect the approximately 210 kilometer long land border with Russia’s Kaliningrad province.
Warsaw has repeatedly expressed fears that Moscow could trigger a migration crisis against Poland from Kaliningrad, similar to the crisis that occurred with Belarus until a few months ago.
The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, forms the only land border between Russia and Poland and is of great strategic importance.
In addition, the Polish government hopes to complete the expansion of a 1,300-meter canal by the end of this year to connect the Polish port of Elblag (north) with the open waters of the Baltic Sea, thus preventing its ships from having to use the canal. built by the Russians opposite Kaliningrad.
On the other hand, in May the Polish government introduced the official use of the Polish name Królewiec to refer to the region hitherto known by the Russian name Kaliningrad.
The wall-building project with Belarus raised concerns among human rights and environmental activists in late 2021 and early last year. The first because they fear that migrants fleeing conflict situations will not be able to apply for asylum and the second because of the harmful consequences for the fauna and flora of the forest area at the border.
The European Union supported Poland and strongly criticized Belarus.
For its part, the Polish government rejected Brussels’ proposal to involve the European agency Frontex in border control and approved a law allowing illegal immigrants to be returned without waiting for them to apply for asylum.
The decision was taken after thousands of migrants, mainly from the Middle East, crossed or attempted to cross the border from Belarus into Poland in the summer of 2021, in a move the European Union accused Minsk of promoting.
Belarus accuses Poland of human rights violations by refusing migrants entry to its territory.
Source: DN
