Did Belarusian Regime 'Backpedal' After Ultimatum?

The situation on the border with Poland has changed dramatically.

The migration crisis on the border arose in 2021 after a sharp deterioration in relations between Minsk and the EU nations as a result of massive human rights violations and aviation piracy by the regime of Aliaksandr Lukashenka. The Belarusian authorities formally deny their involvement in the crisis, although, according to various testimonies, they are directly behind the organization of the arrival of migrants, their transportation to the border and training on how to cross it. As a result, the Belarusian-Polish border area has become a zone of real hybrid conflict with human casualties, both on the part of migrants and Polish border guards.

How the graphs were drawn up

The Polish Border Guard Service regularly publishes data on the number of illegal attempts to cross the border from Belarus on X. It was no exception on July 10, when 40 such attempts were recorded.

To assess the scale of the migration crisis, Belsat journalists collected all these data for 2024 and entered them into special graphs, dividing them into days, decades and months for convenience. At the same time, some fetures of the available information should be noted.

So, for some holidays – January 1 and from April 29 to May 1 – the Border Guard Service of Poland did not publish information about attempts to cross the border. Therefore, the information on the graphs is partially incomplete. But a total of four days in more than six months is unlikely to have much impact on the statistics.

Also at the beginning of the year, the Polish Border Guard Service sometimes reported on migrants seen crossing the border, and in other months – on illegal attempts to cross the border. It is unclear to what extent these are different or the same information.

Quite often, information about crossing the border was reported not in one day, but in several – from two to four. In this case, the daily data were entered into the graphs based on the arithmetic mean figures for these days.

What did the graphs show?

According to the Polish Border Guard Service, a sharp increase in the number of illegal attempts to cross the Belarusian-Polish border began at the end of February, along with the arrival of warm weather in the border areas. If in the snowy and frosty days of January and the first half of February, migrants often did not dare to storm the border for several days, then on March 1 there were 50 such attempts per day. The growth of their number did not stop there. The daily maximum of illegal border crossing was recorded on May 8 and 9 – 651 illegal attempts to cross the border in two days, or an average of 325–326 attempts per day.

May also became a record month with 6,973 attempts. And this is without taking into account the holiday on May 1 with no data included. The May figure is twice as high as in March and more than a third higher than in April.

But in June, the situation changed dramatically. During the first month of summer, the number of illegal attempts to cross the border actually fell to March figures. This is despite the warm weather and "green cover", which, it would seem, should, on the contrary, contribute to illegal migration.

The best way to track the dynamics is to break down the months into decades. If in the last decade of May there were 2226 illegal attempts to cross the border, then in the first decade of June – 1915, the second – 1036, and in the third – only 859. This is not the end of the fall. In the first 10 days of July, only 310 such attempts were recorded, which is comparable to the last decade of February – 235. In the first decade of March, there were already significantly more illegal attempts – 527.

The decrease in the number of illegal attempts to cross the border in June coincides with the tightening of the rhetoric and actions of the Polish authorities against Minsk, which is much more strongly required to stop the migration crisis. This was a response to the wounding on May 28 by a migrant of a Polish border guard who died on June 6. The Polish authorities, on the one hand, expanded the powers of their military and border guards to protect the border, and on the other hand, threatened Minsk with the closure of border crossing points. On June 24, Polish President Andrzej Duda spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visit to Beijing.

And the statistics of border crossing shows that Minsk understood these "hints" and, perhaps, heard the "last Chinese warning". True, not until the end, since migrants are still trying to enter Poland illegally. Perhaps, to stop this, there were problems with the passage of trucks on the Belarusian-Polish border on July 10. Whether the leadership of the Lukashenka regime will hear these signals can be assessed soon.

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