This is a significant increase in the number of Polish troops located close to the Belarusian frontier. Currently, there are around 6,000 of them stationed in a special exclusion zone, according to Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, Poland’s defense minister.
At a joint conference, representatives from the defense and interior ministries said there had been a decrease in the number of attempts to illegally cross the border and the number of smugglers detained since the exclusion zone was introduced on June 13.
“A new mission will be in operation from August 1. Two operations will be completed—one training, one border protection—and a single operation, ‘Safe Podlasie,’ will be created, in which up to 17,000 soldiers will participate,” Kosiniak-Kamysz said.
During the conference, the defense minister also stated that all those who in any way insult soldiers of the Polish army and officers defending the Polish border would face consequences .
Interior Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said in Warsaw on Wednesday: “We are dealing with a decrease by half in attempts to cross the border illegally since the buffer zone was introduced.”
“This is a very specific result related to the fact that we have pushed people smugglers away from the border itself.”
Siemoniak said that since June 4, police riot police have been helping at the border, and within a month, they had trained 12,000 soldiers.
He added that a new procedure had been put in place to make citizens of the countries from which illegal migrants came aware that their crossing of the Polish-Belarusian border is a crime.
