All news

No migrant camps detected near Poland’s border — border guard service

At the moment, there are still about 3,000 to 4,000 people near the border on the Belarusian side

WARSAW, November 24. /TASS/. There currently are no migrant camps in the immediate vicinity of the Polish-Belarusian border but 3,000 to 4,000 people may be staying in the border area, Border Guard Spokesperson in Poland's Podlaskie Voivodeship Katarzyna Zdanowicz said at a briefing on Wednesday. 

In response to a question about impromptu migrant camps, she said: "No, we haven’t detected any." "There may be some inside Belarusian territory. We can see that these people are being brought to the border," Zdanowicz pointed out, adding that Belarus had allocated a logistics center to accommodate migrants who had earlier tried to storm the Polish border.

When asked how many migrants might be staying near the border on the Belarusian side, Zdanowicz said that it was still "about 3,000 to 4,000." "We believe that these are the people who are staying at the logistics center," the border guard spokesperson noted.

Tensions sparked by migrants seeking to enter Poland, Lithuania and Latvia via Belarus exploded on November 8. Several thousand people arrived at the Belarusian-Polish border and remain in the border zone, some trying to cut barbed-wire fences to enter Poland. Migrants left the borderline after clashes with Polish law enforcement officers and moved to the Bruzgi logistics center. According to the Belarusian authorities, about 2,000 migrants have been accommodated there. EU states claim that Minsk is deliberately escalating the crisis and are calling for sanctions. Lukashenko, in turn, blames the situation on the Western countries whose actions forced people to flee their war-torn homelands.