“Poland has enough strength and resources to resist such a big push as well,” said MEP Zbigniew Kuźmiuk about the border situation in an interview with Michał Rachoń in #Jedziemy. “That Monday mattered. It has shown Lukashenko and Putin, who supports him, that this assault on the Polish border will not succeed,” he added.
After Angela Merkel’s talks with Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko, there was supposed to be de-escalation. The day after these talks, it was clear at the border in Kuźnica what was happening. The number of attempts to cross the border illegally is not decreasing, recent reports say. I have the impression that their number is growing,” Rachoń assessed.
“The attack on the border has changed from the frontal one that took place that Monday, which involved a couple of thousand migrants supported by Belarusian services. Now, these people are divided into smaller groups, distributed to different places along the long – 180 km – border. They’re trying to storm it at various points,” – Zbigniew Kuźmiuk said.
The MEP assessed that it is terribly difficult to keep watch on such a long section of the border.
“It’s just as well that there are temporary barriers to prevent direct passage to the Polish side. Border Guards, Soldiers, Territorial Defense Forces are informed with the help of drones, they also track moving groups of immigrants at night and thanks to that these crossings are blocked. On the other hand, that Monday mattered. It has shown Lukashenka and Putin, who support him, that this assault on the Polish border will not succeed, that Poland has enough forces and means to resist such a great attack. This is such a breakthrough in consciousness, also on that side, that it is not possible this way. But, of course, we need to know these realities and know that certainly, these attempts to cross the border will not stop,” – he said.
We very often hear that the opposition politicians in Poland say that this problem has been solved, but not by Poland. “They say that the problem was solved by Angela Merkel and Donald Tusk, who saw her before these talks, that basically the matter is settled and there is nothing to talk about,” Michal Rachoń reported.
“This is an explicitly German narrative. Mrs Angela Merkel, who is leaving this position and is just administering her government at the moment, could not allow Poland to have such a great success, because it is contradictory with those decisions of hers from 2015. I will remind you that at that time she was explaining to the Germans, amazed by that famous “Herzlich Willkommen”, that it couldn’t have been done differently. The individual states, including Germany, were unable to guard their borders, so they had to open them and accept these people. Much smaller Poland is showing that it has stopped a large wave of immigration using its strength and resources because it does not yet have any financial support from the EU budget. If we take a look at social networking sites in Western Europe, they are teeming with thanks for the Polish uniformed services and praise for the Polish government, which has shown all of Western Europe what it means to guard its border and the European Union’s external border, and how it should be done,” – he added.