The Hottest Forest in the World
With Wagner troops hovering, the woods between Poland and Belarus have become kindling for a heated election campaign.
Cans of food and bottles of water marked with Cyrillic script. A thick glove, one finger torn off. A flip-flop sandal.
These are just some of the hastily discarded possessions Mariusz Kurnyta finds on a sunny July afternoon cleaning up the woods near the Bialowieza primeval forest that crosses Poland’s eastern border with Belarus.
“We pick up the stuff they leave because they can’t do it themselves, because they run for their lives,” Kurnyta said. Agnieszka Gryz, a recent university graduate spending the summer volunteering with Kurnyta’s team, steps in to translate from Polish: “[It’s] just a small gesture.”
Thousands of asylum-seekers and migrants each year enter the European Union from Belarus. Some of the most vulnerable—from Syria, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Afghanistan—make their journey surreptitiously through the Bialowieza Forest—548 square miles of grassy wetlands, river valleys, and centuries-old trees. Deer flit between the tall spruce, alder, and oak, and the sound of a woodpecker hammering through an old tree occasionally fills the air.
The number of crossings along this border has fallen since the beginning of the border crisis in 2021, but activists and the Polish Border Guard suggest it may be increasing once again. The head of the Polish Border Guard said that so far this year 19,000 people have tried to cross the Polish-Belarusian border illegally, up from 16,000 for all of last year.
The migrants make this journey with the tacit support of Belarus. The country has been accused of being complicit in human smuggling operations, maintaining an easy visa scheme to aid in their journeys, and using border guards to push refugees on the Belarusian border toward Poland if they try to give up on crossing. And while Belarus has not explicitly encouraged refugees as of late, in June, dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko offered blanket visa-free travel to Belarus through much of July for many of the countries from which refugees flee, ostensibly for a world arts festival in Vitebsk.
In Poland, asylum-seekers face new difficulties. They talk about dodging Polish border guards who block migrants from crossing into the country or even send them back to Belarus. That’s despite a 2022 Polish court decision that made such “pushbacks” without due process illegal. The forest becomes a place to hide while they wait for smugglers to take them west to friendlier member states.
Kurnyta is a lean, bearded man who moves through tangled branches as easily as the summer breeze. He used to work in construction, but he now works full-time with the Wolno Nam Foundation and its subsidiary, Podlaskie Voluntary Humanitarian Rescue, the latter of which sprung up as a result of the wave of migration on the border. He has received awards in Poland for helping dehydrated, exhausted refugees.
Earlier this summer, Podlaskie Voluntary Humanitarian Rescue got a WhatsApp message from a woman in Syria. She hadn’t heard from her husband, Tarek, for nine days since crossing the border into Poland. The last dropped pin he had sent her from his phone was still deep in the Polish side of the woods. Kurnyta hadn’t eaten lunch yet. He grabbed an energy bar and headed out with his friends. But he was not optimistic. “You can’t last out there more than a week without water,” he said.
Kurnyta followed the trail from that dropped pin to find Tarek lying in tall thickets of wet grass. In several days, he had only managed to move 260 feet from his last location.
Today, the question is whether migrants like Tarek will face an even more difficult path going forward as tensions between Belarus and Poland run high. Belarus is amping up its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and now hosts Russia’s Wagner paramilitary force; Lukashenko jokes with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Wagner mercenaries itching to visit Poland. Meanwhile, the steady flow of people across its border from Belarus has focused Polish politics on the issues of border protection and migration. This week, the Polish president announced that Poland’s parliamentary elections had been scheduled for Oct. 15.
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, in particular, has made the border a focal point of its reelection efforts. In late July, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki drew a direct link between the migrants and Wagner mercenaries, positing that Wagner could facilitate refugees’ crossing as a form of “hybrid warfare”—or even that the mercenaries could pose as migrants themselves to enter the EU. “[We are] defending the whole border … so that illegal immigrants do not flood Poland,” he said. In the capital of Warsaw, a banner promising “Bronimy Polskej Granicy” (“we defend the Polish border”) is draped over the Ministry of the Interior, portraying border guards across a fence holding back a faceless crowd.
Law and Justice has long maintained a lead in the polls, but that lead has been fluctuating in recent months. “Migration is one of the topics, they assume, that can mobilize their voters,” said Tom Junes, an assistant professor at the Polish Academy of Science’s Institute of Political Studies in Warsaw. “It’s an opportunity the [Polish] government sees to publicize the potential migration issue and link it to the war.” Morawiecki has promised to spend 4 percent of GDP on defense this year, up from 2.4 percent last year.
lol people still trying after the shit that went down just before russia invaded ukraine? go home.
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Article
The Hottest Forest in the World
With Wagner troops hovering, the woods between Poland and Belarus have become kindling for a heated election campaign.
Cans of food and bottles of water marked with Cyrillic script. A thick glove, one finger torn off. A flip-flop sandal.
These are just some of the hastily discarded possessions Mariusz Kurnyta finds on a sunny July afternoon cleaning up the woods near the Bialowieza primeval forest that crosses Poland’s eastern border with Belarus.
“We pick up the stuff they leave because they can’t do it themselves, because they run for their lives,” Kurnyta said. Agnieszka Gryz, a recent university graduate spending the summer volunteering with Kurnyta’s team, steps in to translate from Polish: “[It’s] just a small gesture.”
Thousands of asylum-seekers and migrants each year enter the European Union from Belarus. Some of the most vulnerable—from Syria, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Afghanistan—make their journey surreptitiously through the Bialowieza Forest—548 square miles of grassy wetlands, river valleys, and centuries-old trees. Deer flit between the tall spruce, alder, and oak, and the sound of a woodpecker hammering through an old tree occasionally fills the air.
The number of crossings along this border has fallen since the beginning of the border crisis in 2021, but activists and the Polish Border Guard suggest it may be increasing once again. The head of the Polish Border Guard said that so far this year 19,000 people have tried to cross the Polish-Belarusian border illegally, up from 16,000 for all of last year.
The migrants make this journey with the tacit support of Belarus. The country has been accused of being complicit in human smuggling operations, maintaining an easy visa scheme to aid in their journeys, and using border guards to push refugees on the Belarusian border toward Poland if they try to give up on crossing. And while Belarus has not explicitly encouraged refugees as of late, in June, dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko offered blanket visa-free travel to Belarus through much of July for many of the countries from which refugees flee, ostensibly for a world arts festival in Vitebsk.
In Poland, asylum-seekers face new difficulties. They talk about dodging Polish border guards who block migrants from crossing into the country or even send them back to Belarus. That’s despite a 2022 Polish court decision that made such “pushbacks” without due process illegal. The forest becomes a place to hide while they wait for smugglers to take them west to friendlier member states.
Kurnyta is a lean, bearded man who moves through tangled branches as easily as the summer breeze. He used to work in construction, but he now works full-time with the Wolno Nam Foundation and its subsidiary, Podlaskie Voluntary Humanitarian Rescue, the latter of which sprung up as a result of the wave of migration on the border. He has received awards in Poland for helping dehydrated, exhausted refugees.
Earlier this summer, Podlaskie Voluntary Humanitarian Rescue got a WhatsApp message from a woman in Syria. She hadn’t heard from her husband, Tarek, for nine days since crossing the border into Poland. The last dropped pin he had sent her from his phone was still deep in the Polish side of the woods. Kurnyta hadn’t eaten lunch yet. He grabbed an energy bar and headed out with his friends. But he was not optimistic. “You can’t last out there more than a week without water,” he said.
Kurnyta followed the trail from that dropped pin to find Tarek lying in tall thickets of wet grass. In several days, he had only managed to move 260 feet from his last location.
Today, the question is whether migrants like Tarek will face an even more difficult path going forward as tensions between Belarus and Poland run high. Belarus is amping up its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and now hosts Russia’s Wagner paramilitary force; Lukashenko jokes with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Wagner mercenaries itching to visit Poland. Meanwhile, the steady flow of people across its border from Belarus has focused Polish politics on the issues of border protection and migration. This week, the Polish president announced that Poland’s parliamentary elections had been scheduled for Oct. 15.
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, in particular, has made the border a focal point of its reelection efforts. In late July, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki drew a direct link between the migrants and Wagner mercenaries, positing that Wagner could facilitate refugees’ crossing as a form of “hybrid warfare”—or even that the mercenaries could pose as migrants themselves to enter the EU. “[We are] defending the whole border … so that illegal immigrants do not flood Poland,” he said. In the capital of Warsaw, a banner promising “Bronimy Polskej Granicy” (“we defend the Polish border”) is draped over the Ministry of the Interior, portraying border guards across a fence holding back a faceless crowd.
Law and Justice has long maintained a lead in the polls, but that lead has been fluctuating in recent months. “Migration is one of the topics, they assume, that can mobilize their voters,” said Tom Junes, an assistant professor at the Polish Academy of Science’s Institute of Political Studies in Warsaw. “It’s an opportunity the [Polish] government sees to publicize the potential migration issue and link it to the war.” Morawiecki has promised to spend 4 percent of GDP on defense this year, up from 2.4 percent last year.
lol people still trying after the shit that went down just before russia invaded ukraine? go home.