Warsaw has increased the number of troops and military hardware along its eastern border with Belarus after accusing Minsk, Moscow’s closest ally, of violating Polish airspace with military helicopters, marking yet another escalation in an intensely strained relationship between the two neighboring countries.
After initially denying the alleged incursion, the Polish Defense Ministry, in a statement that Belarusian authorities have vehemently denied the truthfulness of, said that two Belarusian helicopters that were conducting training exercises near the border had violated Polish airspace.
“The crossing of the border took place in the area of Białowieża at a very low altitude, which made it difficult to be detected by radars,” the Polish Ministry of Defense said in a statement. “Therefore, in the morning message, the Operational Command of the Armed Forces reported that the Polish radar systems did not record any violation of the Polish airspace.”
In the same statement, the ministry noted that Belarusian authorities had “previously informed the Polish side about the training [exercise],” and added that NATO had been informed about the incident.
Responding to Warsaw’s claims in a post to its official Telegram channel, the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Belarus wrote: “Accusations of a violation of the Polish border by Mi-24 and Mi-8 helicopters of the Belarusian Air Force and Air Defense Forces are far-fetched and made by the Polish military and political leadership to justify the build-up of forces and means at the Belarusian border.”
Belarus’ chargé d’affaires, the country’s top diplomat in Warsaw, was “immediately summoned” to the Polish Foreign Ministry to provide an explanation for the alleged occurrence.
The news comes just days after Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki claimed that some 100 Wagner troops had moved to the city of Grodno, not far from the Polish and Lithuanian borders, and accused them of preparing to help facilitate illegal migration into Poland as a way to destabilize the country ahead of elections this fall. He also claimed Wagernites may pose as migrants as a way to make their way into the EU and stage attacks inside the bloc.
Late last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Poland of harboring territorial ambitions in the former Soviet Union, including western Belarus and western Poland, and said that any military incursions into the former would be regarded as an attack on the Russian Federation itself.
Putin claimed there are plans in the works for a Polish-Lithuanian unit to go into western Ukraine, regions that previously belonged to Poland, in order to occupy territory there. “But as far as Belarus is concerned, it is part of the Union State. Unleashing aggression against Belarus will mean aggression against the Russian Federation,” Putin said at a meeting of the Kremlin’s Security Council.
