Poland’s Prime Minister has raised the spectre of a surprise attack by Russia’s Wagner group of convict mercenaries. But there’s an election in the wings. And Poland’s democracy is already under assault.
Speaking at a press conference at the weekend, Mateusz Morawiecki warned that more than 100 Wagner fighters had moved to the Belarusian city of Grodno, close to the border with Poland.
It’s near an area known as the Suwalki Gap – a narrow stretch of land that separates the Russian Black Sea enclave of Kaliningrad from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally.
“Now the situation is becoming increasingly dangerous,” Mateusz Morawiecki told media.
“This is certainly a step towards a further hybrid attack on Polish territory.”
The Suwalki Gap is a 120km-long bridge between Poland and Lithuania, linking the former Soviet Baltic States with the rest of Europe.
It’s long been a chokepoint in Putin’s dreams of a new Russian Empire.
It’s a vulnerable trigger point on a volatile border.
“They will probably be disguised as Belarusian border guards and will help illegal immigrants to enter Polish territory, destabilise Poland,” Morawiecki said, “but they will also probably try to infiltrate Poland pretending to be illegal immigrants, and this creates additional risks.”
But it’s potentially also a politically convenient crisis.
Like Israel, Hungary and Turkey, the ruling government has been accused of working to undermine the independence of the judiciary. And it’s been justifying a shift towards autocracy by emphasising the threat of immigrants crossing its borders.
Asylum seekers have been a cause of tension for several years.
And the border with Belarus has been especially porous, with allegations its President Alexander Lukashenko has been encouraging refugees from the Middle East and Africa to cross into Poland.
Morawiecki has previously called this a form of “hybrid” warfare to destabilise his country. And, like former US President Donald Trump, he’s ordered a high border wall be built in a highly visible effort to stem the flow.
But his Law and Justice Party has also threatened to jail opposition leaders under a politically empowered Commission to Investigate Russian Influence initiated earlier this year.
Electioneering strategy
Poland began repositioning more than 1000 of its troops and 500 police in the eastern parts of the country early in July. It cited concerns that the growing presence of exiled Wagner mercenaries in Belarus could lead to increased troubles along its borders.
Prime Minister Morawiecki now says those fears are coming to pass.
But Poland’s Parliamentary elections are scheduled for October. And the outcome may determine the direction of the former Soviet Union state’s young democracy.
“Both Putin and Lukashenko are trying to influence them, including with threats,” Ryhor Nizhnikau, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute on International Affairs, told Germany’s DW news service.
“(They want) voters to swing in the ‘right’ direction, namely toward those forces that are saying as part of their election campaign that Poland’s role in the war is wrong.”
Poland’s sitting President, Andrzej Duda, won an election campaigned around “LGBT-free zones” and suppressing “gender ideology”, University of Maryland Professor Piotr H. Kosicki said.
And the “hybrid warfare” threat of refugees was first raised in 2021, he added.
“The Polish government had its guards repel the migrants with water cannons, banned media access to the area, and spent over $407 million to build a 115-mile-long (185.075km) steel wall on its border with Belarus,” he wrote.
“The Polish government is fomenting culture wars that paint Ukraine as a historic agent of genocide.
“Ukrainian refugees whom Poland famously welcomed beginning in February 2022 are beginning to face more and more xenophobia across Polish society – in large part because of the sweeping anti-migrant rhetoric that the Law and Justice Party has made the centrepiece of its re-election campaign.”
Wagner’s ‘excursion’
Prime Minister Morawiecki did not explain how he knew a small band of Wagner troops was about to cross his border. And a Belarus opposition group has told Reuters it had not yet seen any evidence of the mercenaries moving towards the border.
Meanwhile, Russia and Belarus point to Poland’s troop movements as justification for their warnings of Poland’s aggressive intent.
International analysts agree that Poland has become a particular focus of President Putin’s ire because of its central role in supporting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And weakening this support would help alleviate the pressure on his beleaguered invasion force.
Putin raised the “Polish issue” at a July meeting of his security council, claiming it was plotting to seize territory in western Ukraine and Belarus.
Later, Lukashenko highlighted the “movement of Polish troops to the borders of the Union State of Russia and Belarus”.
“One of the Polish brigades is now located 40 kilometres from Brest, another one is now deployed about 100 kilometres from Grodno … Rzeszow is becoming more active. The Americans are using its airfield to send equipment and so on.”
He then joked that Wagner’s mercenaries had been “stressing him” about a “sightseeing tour of Warsaw and Rzeszow”.
But University of Essex international affairs expert Professor Natasha Lindstaedt warns Wagner is more likely to play to its own tune.
“It’s not clear how effectively Belarus will be able to control the Wagner Group,” she wrote. “Though Lukashenko has claimed that he has the Wagner Group under control, it is the Wagner fighters that have been training Belarusian special forces near the border with Poland, not the other way around.”
And all such a tiny force could achieve would be to initiate a crisis, added Nizhnikau.
“If I were Lukashenko, I would be careful and not send any Wagner mercenaries to Poland because the Kremlin would immediately disavow them … Lukashenko would be the first victim of this escapade,” Nizhnikau said.
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @JamieSeidel