Poland will have to strengthen its forces on the border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad owing to a growing migration threat, a senior ruling party official has said.
There have been reports that Russia has been bringing migrants from Asia and Africa to its enclave, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, which could mean that Moscow may want to spark a migrant wave into the EU, similar to the one that shook the EU neighbours of Belarus last year.
Krzysztof Sobolewski, the Chair of the Executive Committee of Law and Justice (PiS), said that the Polish government was ready for such an eventuality.
“We have shown that the assault from Belarus has not brought the expected results, at least the ones desired by Putin and (Belarusian President Alexander) Lukashenko,” Sobolewski said on Polish public radio on Tuesday, referring to the migrant crisis from Belarus that culminated in the autumn last year.
“We’ll have to strengthen our forces along this section of the border,” Sobolewski said. “And perhaps consider building similar border structures to those we now have on the Poland-Belarus section.”
In early October, Poland completed the construction of a barrier on its border with Belarus, an investment that was a response to the migration crisis that Warsaw claims was started by Minsk in order to destabilise the EU in retaliation for sanctions it imposed on Belarus.
Sobolewski called the migration movements from Belarus and Russia “a hybrid war” and said it was an offshoot of the broader Russian aggression against Ukraine.