Poland has sounded the alarm as the arrival of Wagner mercenaries in Belarus shifts Russia’s war with Ukraine closer to its outer Nato border.
Poland and Lithuania have warned they may close their respective borders with Belarus amid concerns that disguised mercenaries could try crossing into European Union member states to carry out attacks disguised as asylum seekers.
Sounding the alarm at the weekend, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki warned of “a step toward further hybrid attacks” from mercenaries near the Suwałki Gap, a strategically important point on the Polish-Lithuanian border. The two countries’ 65km-long border is all that lies between Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave and Belarus. It has long been seen as a military vulnerability as an attack by Moscow could undermine Nato efforts to defend the bloc’s three Baltic members.
“The situation is becoming even more dangerous,” said Mr Morawiecki, during a visit to an arms factory in southern Poland which repairs Leopard tanks used by the Ukrainian army. “For almost two years we have been dealing with a permanent attack on the Polish border.” So far this year, he said, 16,000 illegal crossing attempts have been made by “immigrants whom [Belarusian and Russian presidents] Lukashenko and Putin are trying to push over the Polish border”.
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In the last three years Poland and Lithuania have erected fences on their borders with Belarus, Russia and Kaliningrad, accusing Minsk and Moscow of steering migrant flows into the region to destabilise the EU. When Wagner mercenaries began holding training exercises with Belarusian special forces near the border, Warsaw said there was no need for panic. But in a shift of rhetoric at a “family picnic” political rally on Saturday, Mr Morawiecki warned that “Wagner’s troops are ruthless criminals, often recruited from prisons”.
“They are ruthless killers,” he said. “Now they are on the borders of Poland.”
Ahead of October’s general election, critics accuse the prime minister of ramping up the fear factor for domestic political gain. Poland’s liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza suggested Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin was “laughing at Morawiecki because it was enough to move 100 mercenaries to bring the head of government of the fifth-largest EU country to close to panic”.
“Lithuania borders Belarus yet ... with just 2.8 million inhabitants no one has lost their nerve,” noted Gazeta Wyborcza. Earlier this month Lithuania’s defence minister Arvydas Anušauskas suggested the arrival of Wagner mercenaries “does not fundamentally change the situation in the region”.
“I would not call them units, I would call them groups that are transferred to Belarus without weapons, ammunition and logistics, their number is small,” he said. As Poland stepped up its Wagner warnings, Lithuanian defence minister Arvydas Anusauskas called on unnamed European politicians to ignore the “disinformation dance of Pu and Lu”, referring to the Russian and Belarus presidents respectively. Similarly, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov has said his country is not worried about the Wagner presence in Belarus, saying the threat is “not real” at present.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy was reported on Sunday to have said on a visit to western Ukraine that “the war is gradually returning to Russian territory – to its symbolic centres and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process”. His comments follows an attack earlier on Sunday in which two skyscrapers in Moscow’s premier business district were damaged by drone strikes that sparked a fireball and left charred holes in the side of the buildings, in the latest attack on the Russian capital.
Videos taken on Sunday by eyewitnesses showed a drone flying between the high-rise buildings of the Moscow City business area before crashing, causing an explosion at the base of one of the towers. Another video taken from inside one of the buildings showed a destroyed office space scattered with debris. The district, which is grouped on the embankment of the Moscow river on the western edge of the city, is home to leading Russian companies such as VTB Bank and Norilsk Nickel.
Sunday’s attack marks at least the fifth time that unmanned aerial vehicles have reached Moscow since May, when two of the aircraft were shot down over the Kremlin. There was no immediate claim of responsibility from Kyiv, though observers linked it to Zelenskiy’s comments. – Additional reporting: Financial Times and agencies
