Poland sanctions 365 Belarusians and bans Belarusian and Russian trucks

Poland has imposed sanctions on 365 Belarusian individuals, including one of President Alexander Lukashenko’s sons, and 20 companies in response to last week’s decision by Belarus’s Supreme Court to uphold the eight-year prison sentence given to a leading figure from the country’s ethnic Polish minority.

The individuals will be banned from entering the Schengen area and their economic resources will be frozen. Warsaw has also implemented a ban on Belarusian and Russian trucks entering Polish territory at the border with Belarus.

As well as Viktor Lukashenko, who is head of Belarus’s Olympic committee, others added to the sanctions list include the head of the Belarusian KGB intelligence agency, the prosecutor general, and the judge who pronounced the sentence on Polish activist and journalist Andrzej Poczobut.

Poczobut, one of the leaders of the Union of Poles in Belarus (ZPB), was detained in 2021 along with other community leaders as part of a clampdown by the Belarusian authorities on the Polish minority. He was then sentenced earlier this year to eight years in prison for “inciting hatred”.

Although in April, Belarus exonerated another Polish union leader, Angelika Borys, last week the Supreme Court upheld the sentence against Poczobut. The journalist will now be sent to a penal colony after already spending more than two years in custody.

A further 76 judges and seven prosecutors have also been sanctioned by Poland, which says they were involved in the repression of pro-democracy protests as well as “physical and psychological torture, beatings, intimidation and discrimination against the Polish minority”.

Others sanctioned by Poland include 159 parliamentarians, which means that now all of the members of the Belarusian parliament are on the sections list. A number of sports figures, including former Barcelona and Arsenal footballer Alexander Hleb, have also been added to the list.

“These individuals promoted the Belarusian regime and were involved in legitimising and supporting the repressive policies of the authorities in Minsk,” says Poland’s interior minister.

Yesterday, interior minister Mariusz Kamiński also published a regulation banning trucks and trailers registered in Belarus and Russia from entering Poland from Belarus from 1 June.

Since a wave of protests emerged against Lukashenko’s proclaimed election victory in 2020, Poland has been among the leading international supporters of the Belarusian democratic opposition.

Meanwhile, Belarus has taken a number of repressive measures against its Polish community, which is around 300,000 strong according to official estimates but which Poland’s foreign ministry claims may number over a million.

As well as the detention of ethnic Polish leaders, for whose release Warsaw has called repeatedly, a Polish war cemetery was demolished and a historic mural was painted over in a Polish church.

The Belarusian authorities have also orchestrated a crisis on the border with Poland, where they have helped tens of thousands of people – mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa – try to cross illegally into the European Union.

Main image credit: Grzegorz Dąbrowski / Agencja Wyborcza.pl 

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.