EU external border: Poland again registers more migrants at the border with Belarus

Poland has once again registered a growing number of attempts this summer to travel to Belarus. In the months from June to August, border protection noticed 13,800 such experiments, the Ministry of the Interior in Warsaw said. In the same period last year there were 7,500.

Poland and the European Union accuse the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukaschenko, in organized form, to have brought migrants from crisis regions to the EU outer border in order to put pressure on the West. Many of these migrants want to travel further from Poland to Germany.

In the summer of 2022, Poland secured the border with Belarus with a 5.5 meter high fence and an electronic surveillance system. This is also an EU external border.

According to previous information, Polish border protection counts as an attempted border crossing, on the one hand, cases in which migrants have overcome the fence or a border flow and are found on the Polish side by the border guards. However, since the border fence is also on Polish territory, such cases are also counted as “attempted crossing of border”, in which the migrants were noticed directly on the fence, but failed due to the overcoming of the barrier.

The EU and NATO member Poland has an approximately 400 km long border with Belarus, which is an ally of Russia.

Because of the continued tense situation, the Ministry of the Interior extended the validity of the restricted zone along this border by another three months to December 4. The restricted zone has a depth of 200 meters, but also from up to four kilometers in a few places. Only security forces and residents are allowed to stay there, journalists and aid organizations need approval.