October 28, Pozirk. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has announced the planned re-opening of two border crossings at the shared border with Belarus as he addressed a European Union event at the borders in Białystok, eastern Poland.
The move comes as a surprise weeks after Poland shut its border completely accusing Belarus of being a source of hybrid threats.
The re-opening of the two border crossings, most likely Bobrowniki and Kuźnica, is scheduled for early November and would be a “trial” run, interia.pl reported, quoting Tusk as saying. “If it turns out for any reason that the border needs to be closed, I will not hesitate for a moment,” he added, linking such a reaction to potential security concerns.
“If we say that these checkpoints can be opened, it is because the border now is guarded better than ever before,” he said. “We can take a certain risk linked to its opening.”
Currently, Poland operates only the Terespol-Brest checkpoint for passenger traffic and the Kukuryki-Kazłovičy for cargoes.
The Bobrowniki crossing has remained closed since February 2023. Warsaw made its reopening conditional on the release of Polish minority activist Andrzej Poczobut, sentenced in Belarus to eight years in prison in a case widely regarded as politically motivated. Kuźnica was closed in 2021 over the irregular migration crisis, which Warsaw regards as a hybrid attack by Minsk.
Remarkably, earlier today, Alaksandar Łukašenka reiterated his refusal to cooperate with the EU on tackling irregular migration, accusing Belarus’ western neighbotrs of unilaterally curtailing all infrastructure and all cross-border cooperation projects.
Additional crossings can be opened because the Polish-Belarusian border is now better guarded than ever and may be the most heavily secured frontier in Europe, with the benefits expected to outweigh the potential risks, Tusk said.
However, Warsaw needs to coordinate the border reopening with Vilnius, which recently closed its border with Belarus following the influx of cigarette-smuggling balloons from Belarus, the official noted.
