Polish authorities on Tuesday denounced a significant increase in attempts by migrants to cross the border they share with Belarus and again accused Minsk of being behind the situation.
The head of Poland’s National Security Bureau (BBN), Jacek Sewiera, has reported that the proportion of people, especially from the Middle East and Africa, attempting to cross the border has intensified.
Sewiera explains this increase to the air connections that have been established between the countries of origin of these people and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, in the middle of the Baltic Sea and sharing a border with both Poland and Lithuania.
Once again Poland has accused Belarus of using irregular immigration as a weapon to put pressure on its European Union neighbors in response to the sanctions imposed by Brussels for the repression of the opposition and now for its alleged collaboration with Russia in Ukraine.
As a consequence of these actions, in June of this year Poland announced that it had completed the construction of a wall to cover 186 kilometers of its border with Belarus.
More recently, this week Poland announced the start of work on the construction of «a temporary barrier» on the 210-kilometer border it shares with Kaliningrad, 2.5 meters high and three meters wide and topped by three rows of concertinas.
Since the beginning of November, the Polish Border Service has detained 550 people attempting to cross the border illegally, while in October the figure was 2,500 attempts.
