A group of soldiers are standing behind barbed wire and a row of concrete reinforcements block the road in front of them. This is not Ukraine, it’s Poland. The soldiers from the Polish armed forces are guarding one of the main front lines in what European leaders have come to call Russia’s “hybrid war” with the European Union.
Russian president Vladimir Putin and his ally in neighbouring Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, have sought to weaponise migration by pushing thousands of migrants brought from elsewhere in the world over the EU’s borders in an effort to fuel support for anti-immigration far-right parties.
People from states such as Syria, Eritrea, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan are flown to Russia and Belarus, on the promise of building a better life for themselves in Europe. Russian and Belarusian authorities then transport the asylum seekers close to the borders of EU states, where they are given gear and tools to try to get across. Last year nearly 30,000 migrants tried to cross the Polish border from Belarus, a migration route that was non-existent five years ago.
Poland’s hardline response has led to accusations it is forcing asylum seekers back over the border with Belarus, in breach of international law. Controversial legislation working its way through parliament would give the government the power to suspend the rights of people coming from Belarus to claim asylum.
What some have called a necessary measure in response to the weaponisation of migration by Russia and its allies, others have criticised as an EU state curtailing fundamental asylum rights.
[ Derek Scally: Cold war tensions flare up on Polish border with KaliningradOpens in new window ]
Poland’s border with Belarus stretches for more than 400km. The increase in numbers coming from Belarus has seen a huge build-up of border security. A tall steel fence topped with razor wire has been reinforced along key crossing points, with thousands of troops from the Polish army posted to help patrol the area. An electronic trip wire running along the border alerts guards to any crossings, with a vast camera network also monitoring for activity.
Maj gen Arkadiusz Szkutnik, who leads an army taskforce supporting border guards, says the Poland-Belarus border started coming under pressure a year before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. “In spring 2021, Belarus began this so-called ‘floodgates’ operation. Belarus began to transport citizens of African and Asian countries to Russia and Belarus and then relocate them to the border of Poland, Lithuanian, Latvia and Estonia,” he says.
Migrants often have to pay handlers in Belarus and Russia between $8,000 and $12,000 to facilitate their journey, according to Polish officials. The number of attempted crossings into Poland from Belarus increased from just 117 people in 2020 to 37,800 in 2021, according to the Polish border guard. There were a further 15,590 attempted crossings recorded in 2022, 26,000 in 2023, and 29,700 last year.
However, the number of people claiming asylum after crossing from Belarus was just a fraction of those figures. Only 6,046 people applied for international protection over the last four years.
The majority of people detained by Polish authorities did not want to register for asylum in Poland and so were sent back across to Belarus, according to Robert Bagan, commander of the Polish border guard. Many want to get to western Europe, to claim asylum in states such as Germany.
Pushing people back over the Belarusian border is “blatantly inconsistent” with both EU and international law, which prohibits asylum seekers being sent back to a place where they could be at risk, says Adriana Tidona, a migration policy researcher with Amnesty International.
Maciej Duszczyk, undersecretary of state at the ministry of the interior, contests this. “If you have people from Ivory Coast, they want to go to Portugal. If you have people from Pakistan, most of them want to go to the UK. If you have people from Morocco, most of them want to go to France, but they don’t want to be registered in our system.”
Duszczyk claims asylum seekers asked to be sent back to Belarus, hoping to make it further in another attempt, rather than seeking international protection in Poland. “They don’t want to be registered, sometimes [they say]: ‘I don’t want to be here, please push me back, send me back to the Belarusian side to try again’,” he says.
Prime minister Donald Tusk promised to go one step further last October, outlining plans for a new law to suspend the rights of people coming from Belarus to claim asylum.
A largely centrist coalition led by Tusk’s Civic Platform party took power after parliamentary elections 15 months ago. Previously the populist, right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party had been in power for eight years. During that time they eroded the rule of law, politicised the judiciary and the media, demonised the EU and targeted minorities like the LGBT+ community.
The election of Tusk as prime minister was greeted with palpable sighs of relief at the highest levels of Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission and many capitals.
A political heavyweight, Tusk previously served as prime minister from 2007 to 2014, before taking up a senior EU role as president of the European Council. There he chaired the regular summits where national leaders met to decide big picture policy for five years. Upon his return as prime minister, he pledged to mend Poland’s damaged relations with Brussels and reverse the populist policies of the previous ultraconservative government.
Over the last year Tusk has taken a leading role in European politics, stepping into the power vacuum left by Germany and France, due to the weakened positions of French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz.
The centre-right Polish premier’s influential position around the table of 27 EU leaders was clear when they gathered for a summit in October. Migration was top of the agenda. When the doors were closed, Tusk not only defended his plan to close the Poland-Belarus border to asylum seekers, but brought other leaders inside the room around to support his position.
Rather than chastise Poland for a law that civil society organisations have said risks trampling on the right to seek asylum, the European Commission later approved the approach. The EU executive accepted member states beside Russia and Belarus may need to shut those borders to asylum seekers, once the emergency measures were temporary in nature.
Those who have worked closely with Tusk describe him as someone who chooses his words carefully, and likes to be judged on his actions rather than statements. “He reads a lot ... He works very late at night, but he’s not the biggest fan of early mornings,” one source said.
Since taking power, his government has been hamstrung in trying to unwind many policies of the previous administration. PiS still holds the presidency, where Andrzej Duda has been able to veto and delay legislation. Poland’s constitutional tribunal, which adjudicates on contested laws, is also stacked with PiS loyalists.
So Tusk’s ability to deliver on his agenda over the remainder of his four-year term will depend on the outcome of presidential elections later this year. Civic Platform’s candidate, Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, is a well-known figure seen as someone who has done well as mayor of the capital. The PiS choice, Karol Nawrocki, is a historian with little national profile. The race is expected to be tight, with the first of two rounds of voting taking place on May 18th.
Polish military planners have studied how Russian tanks used motorways and roads to quickly advance towards Kyiv in the early days of the invasion of Ukraine
Internally, Tusk’s government remains split on Poland’s restrictive abortion laws. The prime minister had promised to widen access beyond current strict limits, such as cases where the women’s life is at risk. The government has a slim majority, meaning one of the more conservative coalition partners, the rural-based Polish People’s Party, is likely to block attempts to allow for abortion within 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Malgorzata Szuleka, secretary of the board of Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, one of the oldest civil society organisations in Poland, says PiS left plenty of “landmines” within state institutions to make things difficult for the new government.
This is most obvious in the judiciary, where many judges were promoted in political appointments by PiS. “The status of those new judges needs to be addressed because they were appointed in a legally flawed process, but they were still for almost eight years recognised as judges, so we cannot simply sack them,” she says.
Depoliticising the judiciary without attracting accusations that Tusk’s government is itself breaching the rule of law presents a challenge. “In the cases of those new judges, what should be done is every judge should individually be verified,” Szuleka says. If political loyalty was found to have influenced the appointments, they should be annulled, she says.
Overall, Tusk’s coalition had made little progress in reversing PiS policies regarding the rule of law, she says. There was an element of double standards in how Tusk was judged, for example, when disregarding the rights of asylum seekers at the Belarus border, she adds.
“When Law and Justice did something, it was outrageous, it was the end of democracy and the rule of law, but when this government does things that are in some ways similar to Law and Justice, there is a tendency to find a justification for that.”
Stymied in pushing through his domestic agenda, Tusk has put a huge focus on defence and getting the EU to do more to help Ukraine in its fight with Russia. Poland is set to spend close to 5 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defence this year, making it one of the big military beasts in the EU, alongside France.
Significant resources are being put aside to build up defences on its eastern flank. These preparations to fight off a potential ground invasion by Russian forces would have seemed unthinkable several years ago. Polish military planners have studied how Russian tanks used motorways and roads to quickly advance towards Kyiv in the early days of the invasion of Ukraine.
The “eastern shield” plan hinges on slowing down invading forces near the border, ideally buying several days for the army to fully mobilise. That means digging anti-tank trenches and blocking crossings with concrete structures. Stockpiles of landmines will be stored near the border, to be laid in the event of any invasion. “We learned from the war in Ukraine,” says Polish Armed Forces deputy chief of staff Stanislaw Czosnek.
While the defensive military build-up might have been seen as excessive in the past, the Polish military views the threat from the east as very real. If Ukraine had been similarly prepared to fight a full-scale Russian invasion from day one, things might have worked out differently for them in February 2022, Czosnek says.
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