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The Polish Interior Minister has announced that the border crossing between Poland and Belarus in Bobrowniki, located in the northeast of the country, will be shut down as of 12 PM on Friday, February 10, until further notice due to “state security” concerns.
One of the most important transit points between Belarus and Poland is the crossing, which was a focal point during the 2021 migration crisis when thousands of individuals sought to enter Poland from Belarus.
“Due to an important interest of state security, I have decided to suspend traffic at the Polish-Belarusian border crossing in Bobrowniki,” Mariusz Kaminski wrote on Twitter on Thursday.
No explanation given for the closure of the border crossing in Bobrowniki
Afterwards the Sejm, Poland’s lower house of parliament passed a resolution deploring the conviction and imprisonment of Andrzej Poczobut, a Polish-Belarusian activist, by a Belarusian court. Therefore, Kaminski declared that he would be adding more people associated with the administration of Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s president, to the sanctions list.
Grodno court sentenced journalist Poczobut to 8 years in prison on Wednesday. He was arrested in March 2021 and charged with “inciting hatred towards religious and national groups, as well as with the rehabilitation of Nazism.”
Poczobut was active for the Union of Poles in Belarus (ZPB), a Polish minority organisation that has been banned by the Belarusian authorities.
“In connection with the resolution of the Polish Sejm, I have ordered my services to prepare motions to expand the sanctions list with names of more people who are connected with the Lukashenko regime and who are responsible for repressions against Poles living in Belarus,” Kaminski wrote on Twitter.
Last April, a sanctions list was published, containing the names of people who are providing support for Russia’s war against Ukraine, as well as those who are responsible for human rights abuses in Russia and Belarus.
Polish lawmakers in their resolution also called for immediate individual sanctions to be imposed by Poland and the European Union on “those who represented the apparatus of repression of the Belarusian authorities: judges, prosecutors, officials and people involved in the persecution of Andrzej Poczobut.”