Mateusz Morawiecki made the remark in a speech at the border with Belarus in the northeastern Podlaskie province on Thursday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
The prime minister said that for more than two years, Poland has been under “a hybrid attack directed against our eastern border.”
He said that migrants had been seeking to cross illegally into Poland “as part of a planned operation” by Russia and Belarus, designed to destroy the Polish order.
Morawiecki said that according to Poland’s police, army and the Border Guard, this year alone migrants had made more than 16,000 attempts to cross illegally into Poland.
He added: “We are dealing with a security crisis created by Russia after its attack on Ukraine.”
The Polish prime minister said that “Lukashenko’s attack on the Polish border, which began a few months earlier, and the artificially created migrant crisis” represented “a prelude… to the attack on Ukraine.”
Morawiecki told reporters that “Poland was expected to collapse like a house of cards.”
However, the migrant pressure had been stemmed thanks to the policy of the Law and Justice (PiS) party-led government, such as the construction of a physical barrier along the Belarus border, among other measures, he stressed.
The prime minister also mentioned the threat from Russia and from Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries, who had recently relocated to Belarus.
He said: “The Wagner Group are extremely dangerous mercenaries… They showed in Africa, in Ukraine and the Middle East… what kind of war crimes they undertake.”
Morawiecki emphasised that without the efforts of officials and soldiers protecting the Polish border, and the measures introduced by the Law and Justice government, “the Wagner Group would be in Warsaw in two hours.”
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, launching the largest military campaign in Europe since World War II.
Thursday is day 519 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
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Source: PAP, wgospodarce.pl, 300polityka.pl
