According to Warsaw, Poland’s defense minister announced on Wednesday that he would erect a barrier along the border with Russia’s Kaliningrad region to prevent illegal crossings by migrants planned by Russia.
Poland has already erected a physical and electronic barrier on its border with Russia’s ally Belarus, accusing the Belarusian regime of allowing migrants seeking to reach the EU, a move Minsk denies.
Following the launch of flights connecting the Middle East and North Africa to Kaliningrad, he said, “I have decided to take steps to increase security along the border of the Kaliningrad enclave. We are starting to build a temporary barrier there,” Marius Blaszak told reporters.
According to him, the barrier will consist of three parallel fences of barbed wire 2.5 meters high and 3 meters wide and electronic equipment.
He asserted that work on the 210-kilometer long land border would begin “today”.
Warsaw imposed a zone around three kilometers wide and more than 400 kilometers long on its border with Belarus in September 2021 to stem the migration crisis, which Poland views as a Russian-Belarusian “hybrid war”.
The area is off limits to all non-citizens, including members of NGOs that help migrants and journalists.
Since the move last July, access within 200 meters of this border is still prohibited, protected by a five-meter-high metal barrier and equipped with cameras and motion detectors in operation.
Despite the general practice of pushbacks by Poland, around 100 attempts by migrants, mainly from the Middle East, to illegally cross the Polish-Belarusian border are reported daily by border guards and NGOs operating in the square.
