NATO “concerned at escalation” on Polish border, calls for Belarus to “respect international law”

NATO has expressed concern at the “escalating” situation on the Polish-Belarusian border and has called on Belarus to respect international law.

“We have been watching a wave of migrants attempting to enter the territory of our allies Lithuania, Latvia and Poland via Belarus,” said the press office of NATO headquarters in Brussels, quoted by RMF24. “The use of migrants by the Lukashenka regime as a hybrid tactic is unacceptable.”

Since the summer, thousands of people – mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa – have been attempting to cross into Poland and the Baltic states from Belarus. The process has been facilitated by the Belarusian authorities, who help people reach Minsk then get to the border.

This week also saw the discovery by Polish soldiers of unidentified armed, uniformed people on Polish territory. They crossed into Belarus after being confronted.

“We are concerned about the escalation on the Polish-Belarusian border,” said NATO. “We call on Belarus to respect international law…[and] NATO is ready to continue helping our allies and maintaining security in the region.”

It added that NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, “is in close contact with the governments of allied countries on this matter”.

Since the start of the migration wave in the summer, Poland has warned that the actions of the Belarusian authorities are part of a “hybrid war” with Russian backing. The European Commission has also condemned Minsk’s “instrumentalisation” of migrants.

In response to this week’s reported incursion of armed people into Poland, the European Commission said that, “if it is confirmed, it will be another provocation of Lukashenka’s regime towards the EU and its member states” and a “clear violation of the territory of a sovereign state”.

“We have full confidence that the Polish authorities will deal with this incident,” said commission spokesman Peter Stano, quoted by Onet.

The director of the EU’s border agency, Frontex, last month said that he was “impressed by the means deployed [by Poland] to secure the border” after visiting the area. Germany has also thanked Poland for protecting the EU’s eastern frontier.

After speaking with Belarus’s charge d’affaires this week, Polish deputy foreign minister Piotr Wawrzyk reiterated that the government would “defend the border by all means and with all instruments in cooperation with our partners from the EU and NATO”, reports RMF24.

Last week, however, Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko claimed that Poland is in fact the aggressive party. He warned that Poland “might start a war with us” and promised a “brutal reaction” to the deployment of Polish tanks near the border.

While Lukashenko claimed that the tanks were being used as part of Poland’s response to the surge in border crossings, they were in fact in the area as part of a training exercise. There is no evidence of Poland using tanks to tackle the crisis at the border, though independent verification is impossible due to media being banned from the area.

Main image credit: NATO/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.