More than 100 Wagner Group mercenaries have moved toward the Suwałki corridor, a small stretch of NATO territory separating the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad from Belarus, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Saturday.
Morawiecki called it “a step toward a further hybrid attack on Polish territory.”
Poland’s government has used the term “hybrid attack” to describe attempts by the neighboring Belarusian regime to manipulate the flow of migrants through the area, putting pressure on the EU over sanctions against Minsk. Polish officials have said that its ally Russia helps Belarus with this scheme.
“We have an information that more than 100 Wagner Group mercenaries have moved towards the Suwałki corridor, not far from (the Belarusian city of) Grodno. Why did they do it? This is certainly a step towards a further hybrid attack on Polish territory,” Morawiecki said in a speech at a mechanical plant in southern Poland.
So far this year, there have been about 16,000 attempts by migrants to cross the border illegally, “pushed to Poland” by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mateusz said.
The prime minister warned, according to the Polish Press Agency, that Wagner mercenaries may try to pose as migrants in order to cross from Belarus into Poland.
“They will probably be disguised as Belarusian border guards and will help illegal immigrants to enter Polish territory, destabilize Poland, but they will also probably try to infiltrate Poland pretending to be illegal immigrants and this creates additional risks,” he said.
Rising tensions: This is the latest example of regional tensions inflamed by Lukashenko welcoming Wagner troops into his country following their short-lived rebellion against Moscow.
Belarus announced earlier in July that its forces will hold joint exercises with Wagner fighters near the border with Poland. Putin also made a series of unsubstantiated allegations last week, accusing Poland of harboring plans to “directly intervene” in the war and “tear off” parts of Ukraine for itself, also claiming Warsaw has aspirations to annex parts of Belarus.
Germany has pledged NATO would defend alliance member Poland in case of an attack.
More on the Suwałki corridor: This thin strip of land, also known as the Suwałki gap, is the only overland link between the Baltic states — NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and the rest of the European Union. The corridor separates the Russian standalone region of Kaliningrad from Belarus and connects Polish and Lithuanian territory.
Kaliningrad was captured by Soviet troops from Nazi Germany in April 1945 and then became part of Soviet territory as a result of the Potsdam Agreement. It was renamed from the German Königsberg in 1946.
In 2002, the EU and Moscow reached an agreement on travel between Russia and Kaliningrad, ahead of Poland and Lithuania joining the European Union in 2004. When those countries joined, the exclave became surrounded on three sides by EU territory.
Russia says the 2002 agreement has now been violated, with Lithuania banning the flow of sanctioned goods across its territory. But the government in Vilnius says it is merely upholding EU sanctions introduced following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia has not acknowledged that it has nuclear weapons based in Kaliningrad, but in 2018 the Federation of American Scientists concluded that Russia had significantly modernized a nuclear weapons storage bunker in the region, based on analysis of satellite imagery.
CNN’s Tim Lister and Rob Picheta contributed reporting to this post.