WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Over 100 mercenaries belonging to the Russian-linked Wagner group in Belarus have moved near the border with Poland, the Polish prime minister stated Saturday.
Mateusz Morawiecki stated at a information convention that the mercenaries had moved near the Suwalki Hole, a strategic stretch of Polish territory located between Belarus and Kaliningrad, a Russian territory separated from the mainland.
Poland is a member of each the European Union and NATO, and it has anxious about its safety with Russian ally Belarus and Ukraine on its jap border.
These fears have grown since Wagner group mercenaries arrived in Belarus because the group’s short-lived insurrection earlier this summer season.
The Poland-Belarus border has already been a tense place for a few years, ever since giant numbers of immigrants from the Center East and Africa started arriving, looking for to enter the EU by crossing into Poland, in addition to Lithuania.
Poland’s authorities accuses Russia and Belarus of utilizing the migrants to destabilize Poland and different EU international locations. It calls the migration a type of hybrid warfare, and has responded by constructing a excessive wall alongside a part of its border with Belarus.
“Now the state of affairs turns into much more harmful,” Morawiecki informed reporters.
He added that “that is actually a step in the direction of an extra hybrid assault on Polish territory.”
Morawiecki spoke throughout a go to to an arms manufacturing facility in Gliwice, in southern Poland, the place Leopard tanks utilized by the Ukrainian military are being repaired.