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Why Poland declared an emergency on its border
Summary
A retrospective on the Polish state of emergency on the Belarus frontier, and on a nuclear memorandum signed by Ukraine's Energoatom two days earlier.
What prompted Poland to declare a state of emergency on its border with Belarus? On 2 September 2021, the answer was a rise in illegal migration. The Polish Border Guard said there had been around 3,500 attempts to cross the border illegally in August, of which 2,500 were unsuccessful.
The declaration became part of what is now called the 2021 Belarus–European Union border crisis. The figures cited by the Border Guard put the scale of the pressure on the frontier in concrete terms: roughly one attempt in three had, by that count, got through in the month before the declaration.
A nuclear agreement in the United States
Two days earlier, on 31 August 2021, a separate regional development took place in the United States. Ukraine's state enterprise Energoatom and Westinghouse Electric signed a memorandum on building a power unit at the Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plant.
The two items were unrelated. Together they show the range of issues affecting Ukraine's neighbourhood in the final days of that August: border security on the European Union's eastern edge, and energy cooperation between Kyiv and a US company.
