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Poland's Senate backs a border wall with Belarus
Summary
A look back at the Senate vote of 29 October 2021 and the troop build-up that preceded it.
What did Poland's decision to approve a border wall say about the pressure it faced from Belarus? On 29 October 2021, the Senate of Poland approved a plan to build a wall along the country's border with Belarus, at an estimated cost of €353 million (US$407 million). The measure was a response to an influx of migrants.
The build-up
The vote followed a rapid escalation on the ground. On 26 October 2021, Poland raised the number of soldiers deployed on the Belarus border from 6,000 to about 10,000. The aim was to prevent further illegal crossings by Middle Eastern migrants who, according to Warsaw, were being flown in by the Belarusian government.
The troop increase came after two border guards were hospitalised over the preceding weekend, when a group of 70 migrants stormed a section of the border.
Two layers of response
Taken together, the two decisions show Poland combining a short-term and a longer-term answer. Additional soldiers addressed the immediate pressure along the frontier, while the Senate's approval of the wall committed funds to a permanent barrier. The €353 million estimate gave a first measure of the scale of that commitment.
The episode belonged to what became known as the 2021 Belarus–European Union border crisis, which affected relations between Belarus and Poland. The wall approval of 29 October 2021 was one of the clearest formal steps Warsaw had taken in response up to that point.
