Poland reports surge in illegal crossing attempts at Belarus border

April 13, Pozirk. The Polish Border Guard has said it thwarted 457 attempts by migrants from Asia and Africa to cross into Poland from Belarus on April 10.

That was the record number of daily attempts reported by Poland this year.

The migrants threw stones and branches and sprayed some gas at border guards, injuring one officer. Border guards apprehended six people suspected of facilitating illegal migration and provided medical assistance to four migrants.

The Baltic States and Poland accuse Minsk of manufacturing the migrant crisis, while the latter blamed it on the West.

The day after the daily surge, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk accused Alaksandar Łukašenka of using migration and tension at shared border for his political ends.

Tusk stressed that he would urge all of Poland’s EU partners to tighten border security.

In August 2023, the interior ministers of Poland and the Baltic States warned that they might close the border with Belarus in response to a possible influx.

Now they definitely have reason to consider tough measures.

In the first 11 days of April Poland reported 2,673 attempts. That was a 13-percent rise from April 2023.

Meanwhile, Alaksandar Łukašenka on April 11 complained to Russian President Vladimir Putin about tension at the border with Poland.

“And Lithuanians, Latvians. . . . First, they throw tens of dead bodies across the border. A certain number of migrants is going there; and they push them back. They have built the fence. So, they throw them over the fence to us at the border. As snow melted, dead bodies became exposed right there at the border,” his press office quoted him as saying.

Despite the spike at the Polish border, the Lithuanian State Border Guard Service registered just one attempt on April 11 and 12, while their Latvian counterparts prevented 47 foreigners from entering the country illegally.

Since the start of 2024, the EU thwarted at least 7,784 illegal border crossing attempts at its shared border with Belarus, with 6,554 attempts via Poland, 1,069 via Latvia and 161 via Lithuania.

The migration crisis at the Belarusian-EU border started in spring 2021 after Łukašenka, angered by EU sanctions, had indicated that Minsk would not prevent migrants from Africa and Asia from using Belarus as a route to the EU. It escalated in November 2021, with hundreds of migrants storming the Polish border.

In June 2021, the Belarusian government announced the suspension of a readmission agreement with the EU in response to sanctions that followed the forced landing of a Ryanair flight in Minsk in an operation by Belarus’ security service.

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Polish border guards prevent group of more than 200 migrants from crossing from Belarus

April 10, Pozirk. Border guards and soldiers in Poland's Podlaskie region stopped a group of more than 220 people coming from Belarus this morning, amid a spike in illegal migration, according to the Polish Border Guard. The group tried to …

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