Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko wants to talk to Poland. He is reacting to the stationing of 10,000 Polish soldiers at the border.
Amid rising tensions between Poland and Belarus, Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko has announced that he intends to establish contacts with Warsaw. “We have to talk to the Poles. I have instructed the prime minister to contact them,” Lukashenko said on Friday, according to the state news agency Belta. Both countries are neighbors and “you can’t choose your neighbors,” he added.
Relations between Minsk and Warsaw are currently at a low point. On Thursday, the Polish government announced that it would send thousands of additional soldiers – a total of 10,000 – to the eastern border with Belarus as a “deterrent”. The Belarusian ruler said that Poland wanted to “escalate the situation”. Before the upcoming parliamentary elections in October, the government in Warsaw wants to show that the country is sufficiently armed.
NATO member Poland has repeatedly warned of a threat from Belarusian “provocations” and of dangers posed by the mercenaries of the Russian Wagner Group that are now based there. Warsaw also accuses Belarus and Russia of increasingly organizing border crossings for migrants into the European Union in order to destabilize the region.
