Poland will deploy 2,000 soldiers to bolster its border with Belarus
In order to ensure calm, the Polish government would send 2,000 soldiers to its border with Belarus, according to Maciej Wasik, deputy interior minister.
According to Wasik, the head of Poland’s border guard first requested 1,000 more troops, but the Security Committee and Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak agreed to double the amount. Wasik was speaking to the Polish Press Agency (PAP) on Wednesday.
According to the PAP, over 2,000 Polish soldiers are now deployed at the Poland-Belarus border to help hundreds of police officers and border guards.
The extra soldiers are expected to be deployed in less than two weeks, according to the deputy interior minister.
The development takes place when tensions between the two neighboring countries remain high.
Authorities in Warsaw had earlier this month claimed that on August 2, while participating in training exercises, two Belarusian helicopters had breached Polish airspace.
The incident took place in the eastern border region of Bialowieza, which is south of the Suwalki gap, a narrow sliver of land between Poland and Lithuania that connects Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and serves as the only overland route between the Baltic states and the rest of the EU.
However, Belarus angrily refuted the claim and labeled it as “far-fetched.”
Additionally, according to sources cited by CNN, men from the Wagner mercenary organization were advancing from Belarus into the Suwalki Gap.
The mercenaries were moving towards Suwalki through Grodno, a city in western Belarus, in a scenario that was “becoming even more dangerous” as Russian-allied troops attempted to extend their presence close to the NATO border, according to Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister of Poland.
In order to assist its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow exploited Belarusian territory, which improved relations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his counterpart in Minsk, Alexander Lukashenko.
