Poland will soon start building an electronic fence at its border with Kaliningrad Oblast as it fears Russia and Belarus will again help migrants cross the border in a bid to destabilise Europe.
The barrier will cover about 200 kilometres of land border and include a system of cameras and detectors, the Polish Press Agency (PAP) reported. Construction works are set to start in March, announced Polish Border Guard spokeswoman Anna Michalska.
“The border guards will be able to control the border (…) The detecting systems will send alerts, the algorithms of which will be constructed in a way that will allow the guards to react to actual attempts of crossing the borders by humans, not animals,” explained Michalska, quoted by PAP.
Poland is preparing for a repeat of the 2021 border crisis, where thousands of African and Middle-Eastern refugees and migrants attempted to enter the country through Belarus.
Minsk denied engineering the situation at the time, and instead blamed Warsaw and Brussels for causing a humanitarian crisis that led to the deaths of several migrants in forests along the border.
For now, the situation at the Polish-Russian border remains stable and calm, according to a regional Border Guard spokeswoman.
Last year, the guards reported 11 cases of illegal crossing at the Kaliningrad Oblast border. Moreover, there are cases of trenching upon the border strip by mushroom pickers, who lost their way, or tourists that want to take a photo with the border post.
Since last November, the Polish army on request by the Border Guard has been installing a concertina wire barrier along the border with Kaliningrad.
(Aleksandra Krzysztoszek | EURACTIV.pl)
Source: euractiv.com
