The Polish government says migrants are attacking their border patrol with “full aggression” on the Belarusian frontier, arming themselves with a variety of makeshift weapons.
“Although the numbers [attempting to cross] change, the methods remain the same – migrants, always in groups, encouraged and directly aided by Belarusian services – storm the Polish border with full aggression,” said Stanisław Żaryn, Director of the National Security Department, in an update on the border crisis received by Breitbart London.
“Stones and rubble delivered by Belarusians, logs, metal poles from destroyed border fencing are used as weapons against the Polish border patrols,” Żaryn said, sharing several tweets from Polish government accounts from recent days showing the damage done to border fortifications by would-be illegal immigrants and footage of Polish forces being attacked and verbally abused.
Żaryn noted that the “hybrid operation by the regime of A[lexander] Lukashenko, with a silent support of the Kremlin” — as Poland and its EU and NATO allies see the crisis — is persisting “regardless of the fact that it has become less spectacular” than it was in November; indeed he later added that the “attacks on our border have become more aggressive in recent days,” if anything.
The migrant crisis on NATO’s eastern frontier, which also afflicts the Baltic States of Lithuania and Latvia, is widely regarded as having been engineered by Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who has allowed people to fly into his country from the Middle East in large numbers as “tourists” so they can use the former Soviet Socialist Republic as a staging post to sneak over the EU’s external border.
This destabilising “hybrid aggression” is punishment for the EU in general and Poland and the Baltics in particular for having placed sanctions on Belarus and offered asylum to Lukashenko’s opponents and critics, which were stepped up after he used his air force to effectively hijack a passenger jet flying from Greece to Lithuania earlier this year.
The Polish government further believes Lukashenko “would not have dared to organise and conduct such a major operation against the West without the support of its political patron in the Kremlin,” and that Russia is only denying involvement so it can position itself as a mediator and win concessions elsewhere.
The Poles have not managed to stop every attempting crossing, but have been far more robust than some other European countries, and recently announced that they are working with “representatives of Iraq and Congo in the procedure of identification of those foreigners who, having managed to illegally enter Poland from Belarus without any ID documents, have been detained and placed in centres kept by the Polish authorities” — presumably with a view to quickly deporting them.
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