‘The Border With Belarus Will Be Completely Closed In This Case’

It’s likely that important decisions will be made in the near future.

The question of whether Poland and other EU countries will completely close the border with Belarus, in the light of recent events, is becoming increasingly relevant.

As the Charter97.org website reported, Poland closed the Bobrowniki checkpoint on February 10 in retaliation to the harsh sentence of Andrzej Poczobut by the Lukashists. Later, the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland Łukasz Jasina said that the Terespol border checkpoint could also be closed: such a decision is already “on the table”. Earlier, Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki announced this possibility.

Poland and Lithuania dealt a powerful blow to the Lukashenko regime's smuggling and limited the sources of income for the dictator's entourage by closing border crossings with Belarus. At the same time, the official Minsk aggravated the border situation further, starting to block Polish freight transport. Since February 18, Belarusian border guards have not allowed trucks from Poland, as well as trucks with Polish license plates, to pass through the border crossings from Lithuania and Latvia.

Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kamiński warned the Lukashenka regime about retaliatory measures due to the restriction of the movement of Polish trucks.

Will Warsaw completely close the border with Belarus? Journalist Ruslan Shoshyn does not rule out such an option in his article for Belsat.

“Let's try to imagine such a situation. Poland completely closes the Brest-Terespol road and railway crossing. At the same time, Warsaw is coordinating these actions with Lithuania and Latvia, which are also banning traffic on their borders with Belarus. Thus, trade with the European Union through the western borders is completely stopped, and the Belarusian economy is losing several billion euros a year,” the journalist writes.

Is it really possible? The journalist’s sources in the Polish government say that a complete closure of the border is “unlikely today”. However, the situation is changing quite dynamically.

“We see the sentiments in Warsaw and the actions of the Lithuanian government, a complete suspension of trade flows cannot be ruled out. It seems that appropriate decisions can be made in the near future. Also, we have no yet another invasion of Ukraine from Belarus.

If Lukashenka still allows Russian troops to pass through Belarus again, we should expect the toughest decisions from Poland and the Baltic countries. It is important to get that nobody will worry about the 'interests of ordinary Belarusians' in this case. Most likely, the border will be completely closed then” Ruslan Shoshyn notes.