All news

Poland against planting anti-personnel mines on border with Russia, Belarus — Tusk

"We are not planning to plant mines [at the border with Russia and Belarus]," the minister said

MOSCOW, May 21. /TASS/. Poland has no intentions of planting anti-personnel mines along its state border lines with Russia and Belarus as part of its earlier announced Shield-East project, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday.

According to him, Warsaw has no plans of withdrawing from the ‘Ottawa Treaty,’ which prohibits the use of such mines.

"We are not planning to plant mines [at the border with Russia and Belarus]," Tusk said at a news conference. "We have no intentions for Poland coming up with an initiative of changing the international law regarding this issue."

The Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction was signed in Canada in 1997 and it is also known informally as the Ottawa Treaty. The document came into force on March 1, 1999 and includes 164 countries as its signatories.

On May 18, Polish PM Tusk announced a national project, codenamed Shield-East, to beef-up a 400-kilometer (almost 250 miles) stretch of Poland's state border with Russia and Belarus.

"We are opening a great project of the construction of a safe border, including a system of fortifications and of the shaping of terrain, (of) environmental decisions that will make this border impenetrable by a potential enemy," the Associated Press quoted him as saying on May 18.

"We have taken the decision to invest into our safety and first of all, into a safe eastern border, some 10 billion zlotys ($2.5 billion)," Poland’s prime minister added.