Poland ends emergency on Belarus border

What did it mean when Poland decided, on 9 June 2022, to lift its state of emergency along the Belarus frontier? The decision concerned attempts by migrants to cross the Belarus–Poland border, part of the 2021–2022 Belarus–European Union border crisis. Warsaw said the barrier it had been building was mostly complete, and that was the stated reason for ending the emergency measures.

The step was a local border-management decision, but it came while the war in Ukraine was shaping the whole region. In the days before, the human and material cost of the conflict had been laid out repeatedly.

The war's toll in the preceding days

On 3 June 2022, the Red Cross said the scale of destruction after just 100 days of war was beyond comprehension. Its director general, Robert Mardini, noted that a third of the population had been forced to flee in that short period.

On 4 June, Ukraine's defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, speaking at the GLOBSEC-2022 forum in Bratislava, said it was hard to predict when the war would end, but offered an optimistic forecast that it could finish by the end of the year. The same day, President Zelensky said the All Saints Skete in Sviatohirsk, whose original church dated from 1526, had become the last of 113 churches destroyed by Russian artillery.

On 5 June, Zelensky said in his evening address that he had visited troops on the front line at the border of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, including in Lysychansk and Soledar, and that he was proud of everyone he had met.

Two stories, one region

Poland's announcement and the war reports were separate developments. Together they show a neighbourhood handling two pressures on 9 June 2022: a frontier on which Poland judged its physical barrier largely finished, and a war that Ukraine's defence minister hoped might end within the year while humanitarian groups described devastation on an immense scale.