Poland this year again registered a significant rise in the number of attempts to enter the country via Belarus without authorization, a senior government official said on Thursday.
Between January 1 and December 15, the border guard registered 30,000 such attempts, Deputy Interior Minister Czesław Mroczek told a parliamentary debate in Warsaw.
In 2023 as a whole, the number was just under 26,000, and in 2022 it was more than 15,000, according to Mroczek.
Poland and the European Union accuse the authoritarian Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko of bringing migrants from crisis regions to the EU’s external border in an organized manner in order to exert pressure on the West.
In the summer of 2022, Poland secured the border with Belarus with a 5.5-metre-high fence and an electronic surveillance system. This is also an EU external border.
According to earlier reports, the Polish border guard counts cases in which migrants have crossed the fence or a border river and are intercepted on the Polish side as attempted unauthorized border crossings.
However, as the border fence is also located on Polish territory, cases in which the migrants were noticed directly at the fence but failed to cross the barrier are also counted as attempted border crossings.