Poland has been facing a rather significant influx of migrants from Belarus and there have been no shortage of conflict on the border directly either. The situation is not going to improve anytime soon after Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has stated he won’t stop the flow of irregular migrants across the Belarus-Poland border. Now China and President Xi Jinping are also part of the equation as Poland is trying to leverage a key Belarus-crossing Chinese-European trade route in trying to get things to go its way.
EU officials, especially those in Poland, have charged that since 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his ally Lukashenko have purposefully made it easier for irregular migrants to enter the EU by giving them visas and help with transportation. The main migration route connects Belarus to the border with Poland. In response to EU sanctions on Minsk, Brussels has charged Belarus with using migrants as a “political weapon” to exert pressure on the bloc.
Belarus has no intention of stopping migrants from entering the transit route to the European Union, President Alexander Lukashenko stated in on Russian television on Monday.
Poland has strengthened a large portion of its border with an electronic surveillance-equipped 5.5-meter-tall fence. Nevertheless, attempts to cross the border persist every day in spite of these precautions; Polish border guards have recorded 201 instances of irregular crossing in just three days this week.
In the meantime, the German news agency dpa stated that in the first half of the year, 3117 unauthorized entries were detected by Germany’s federal police via the Belarus route. 11 932 persons entered through this route in total in 2022.In June, Polish President Andrzej Duda raised the issue of irregular migration at the Belarus-Poland border during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, German news outlet Tagesspiegel reported. The director of the Warsaw Enterprise Institute’s (WEI) Center for Strategic Studies, Lukasz Wojdyga, is quoted in the report from his newsletter Poland Globally.
Duda reportedly threatened to force Poland to completely close its border with Belarus and urged Xi to use his influence on Alexander Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus. Since then, Wojdyga said, there has been a “significant decrease” in the number of undocumented migrants entering Poland from Belarus.
China’s reliance on an open trade route through Belarus to transport goods to the EU is largely to blame for the decline. According to Wojdyga, rail transport is the fastest option, requiring 26 days for shipments.