Poland kicked off a large-scale military operation along the border with Belarus on August 1, ostensibly to secure the frontier in the face of what Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz characterized as a migrant-fueled “hybrid war” against Warsaw. Why does Minsk have reason to be wary of Warsaw’s official justifications?
The Polish border defense operation, dubbed ‘Safe Podlasie’ (referring to the northeastern Polish province of Podlaskie) involves about 17,000 troops led by the 18th Mechanized Division of the Polish Armed Forces, with the officially-stated aim of the deployment being to fight illegal migrant flows in a dispute with Belarus that goes back to 2021.
“Our soldiers will counter illegal crossings in places that are not intended for this. This operation is a response to illegal immigration from the east, which poses a challenge to Poland’s internal security,” Kosiniak-Kamysz said ahead of the deployment.
Poland has already built a 186 km long, five-meter high, $400 million anti-immigration border fence along part of the border, and plans to construct a massive, 200-meter to 2 km-wide “buffer zone” at some point in the future.
But Operation ‘Safe Podlasie’ was kicked off simultaneously with Operation Eastern Aurora, a NATO mission ostensibly meant to secure Polish airspace “in the face of unpredictable Russian actions,” thus potentially betraying Warsaw’s true intentions and rationale for the troop buildup.
Belarus has long been skeptical of Warsaw’s military deployments on its western frontier.
With over 216,000 personnel under arms (the Belarusian military has about 65,000 troops total, for comparison), Poland has the third-largest military in NATO after the US and Turkiye, and has dramatically ramped up the deployment of alliance assets and troops (including a new American missile defense facility in Redzikowo, northern Poland with offensive capabilities) in recent years. In March, Poland hosted the Dragon 24 wargames, involving some 20,000 NATO troops and 3,500 pieces of military equipment.
Successive Polish governments have had long-standing ambitions to topple Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to install a more European Union and NATO-friendly government, sponsoring and lending other forms of aid to radical opposition forces in the country, most recently in 2020.
Some Polish geostrategists see Belarus as a key piece of the ‘Intermarium’, a geopolitical concept first conceived by Polish statesman Jozef Pilsudski in the first part of the 20th century to ‘reunite’ the territories of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to contain Russia from the Baltic to the Black Seas.
Some Poles also consider the lands of western Belarus as the Polish ‘borderlands’. In 2020, Lukashenko accused Warsaw of harboring plans to annex Grodno region amid the foreign-backed post-election unrest facing Belarus at the time. The Polish government vocally denied the claims.
Lukashenko warned in an address to the All-Belarusian People’s Assembly in April that the threats to Belarus from Poland and the Baltic States has increased dramatically in recent years.
“We see how, across our western borders, airfields, naval bases and training grounds are being improved at an accelerated pace, forward bases are being created for the advance placement and storage of equipment, weapons and materiel. To date, five airfields, two naval bases and six large training grounds have been modernized in Poland and the Baltic states,”
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