Belgium, (Brussels Morning Newspaper) Poland is considering the idea to build a wall on its border with Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave between Lithuania and Poland.
Warsaw fears that Russia is planning to use migrants from Asia and Africa as part of its hybrid warfare campaign aimed at destabilising Europe, according to Reuters reporting on Tuesday.
Last year, Belarus sent thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa over its borders with Lithuania, Latvia and Poland, with Warsaw suspecting that Moscow could resort to the same means.
Belarus rejected accusations that it was flying in migrants and sending them across the border, blaming the EU for deaths of several migrants on the border.
Krzysztof Sobolewski, chair of the executive committee of the ruling Law and Justice party, reminded in an interview on Tuesday that Poland built a wall on the border with Belarus.
He noted that the government is thinking about doing the same on the border with Kaliningrad. “We will have to strengthen our forces on this section of the border and also consider… building similar border fortifications to those we now have on the Polish-Belarusian section,” he added.
Flights to Kaliningrad
According to Russian media, Kaliningrad has opened to flights from Asia and the Middle East with the aim of attracting more tourists.
On the border with Belarus, Poland built a wall that is more than 5 metres tall and equipped with cameras and motion sensors. It stretches along roughly 187 kilometres of the border.
The Polish government previously announced that it allocated funds for the border guard to set up sensors and cameras along the border with Kaliningrad.
The Polish Border Guard noted on Tuesday that it is in the process of choosing a company to build the “electronic barrier” on the border and predicted that it will wrap up the process by the end of November.
According to plans, the electronic barrier is to be constructed along approximately 200 kilometres of border, with construction to be completed by the final quarter of 2023.
Sobolewski pointed out that it appears larger groups of migrants are gathering at the border with Belarus and warned that more migrants could try to enter Poland from Kaliningrad “in the coming weeks.”
