Belarusian-led migrants have tried to invade Poland en masse – SME.sk

WARSAW. Hundreds of migrants tried to break into Belarus from Poland on Monday, cutting through a razor fence and trying to climb through barriers with the help of branches.

The Polish Ministry of the Interior said it had repulsed the illegal invasion and that the situation was under control.

It also published a video in which an armed Polish officer uses a chemical spray on men who wanted to cut a razor fence. Some migrants threw objects at police officers.

Poland accused Belarus of organizing the event

President Andrej Duda, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and several ministers spoke about the situation at the crisis. Polish government spokesman Piotr Müller clarified that several scenarios of the development of a momentum war by Belarus were discussed at the meeting.

The head of the Office of National Security, Pawel Soloch, who also attended the meeting, said that the Polish president and government were considering various measures to resolve the crisis and were in constant contact with partners within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the EU.

Soloch also added that the EU should impose new and tougher sanctions on the Belarusian authorities, according to the PAP agency.

Polish intelligence spokesman Stanislaw Zaryn said in a statement that large groups of migrants on the Polish-Belarusian border “are fully controlled by the Belarusian security services and the army.”

He also accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenkothat it is thus destabilizing Poland and other European Union (EU) countries to put pressure on the bloc to lift sanctions on Minsk.

Government spokesman Piotr Müller said that there were three to four thousand migrants on the Belarusian side of the border. However, according to the AP, this cannot be independently verified, as journalists have limited activity in Belarus and the state of emergency in Poland prevents reporters and humanitarian workers from entering the area.

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Belarus has invoked migrants’ rights

A spokesman for the Belarusian Border Guard Committee, Anton Bychkovsky, told the AP that migrants on the border between Belarus and Poland only wanted to “exercise their right to apply for refugee status in the EU”.

He insisted that “they are not a security threat” and “they are not behaving aggressively.” As he added, referring to the refugees, they grouped into a large group in order to avoid a “forced expulsion by the Polish side”.

Poland stated that they could apply for refugee status at Polish diplomatic missions abroad, including Belarus.

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Poland sent more troops to the border

The European Union has expressed hope that Poland will finally accept the assistance of the EU Border Protection Agency Frontex, which Polish ruling nationalists have so far rejected. European Commission spokesman Adalbert Jahnz called what was happening at the bloc’s eastern border a continuation of “Lukashenko’s desperate attempt to use people as pawns to destabilize the European Union and, of course, the values ​​we uphold”.

Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said on Monday that the number of troops stationed on the border with the eastern neighbor had increased from 10,000 to 12,000. According to him, the forces of voluntary territorial defense are also on standby.

Polish ministers had extraordinary discussions on the crisis. They later met with President Andrzej Dud at security consultations.

The grouping of large numbers of people at the border seems to be an escalation of a crisis of several months, during which the Belarusian regime is supporting migrants from the Middle East and other parts of the world in the illegal transition to the European Union.

At present, it is primarily Poland, but there have been transitions as well Lithuania and Latvia. Lithuania is currently preparing for the possibility of a migrant invading its territory similarly to Poland. The local Ministry of the Interior proposed a declaration of emergency and a regrouping of the border guards.