A pair of Belarusian helicopters “violated” Poland’s airspace during a scheduled training mission, according to Polish defense officials.
“An analysis of the situation has determined that Polish airspace was violated by two Belarusian helicopters conducting training near the border,” the Polish Defense Ministry said Tuesday. “In response to the violation of the airspace of the Republic of Poland by two Belarusian helicopters on August 1, 2023, the charge d’affaires of the Belarusian embassy was immediately summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
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Lukashenko’s regime denied the allegation, which the Polish government leveled after initially contradicting local reports that the helicopters were seen flying over villages in eastern Poland. The announcement portends rising tensions between Belarus, a client regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin that has a “union state” agreement with the Kremlin, and its NATO neighbors, just weeks after Lukashenko began to welcome Russia’s mutinous paramilitary force, the Wagner Group, into Belarus.
“Poland expects Belarus to abstain from such activities,” the Polish Defense Ministry stated. “We remind you that Russia and Belarus have intensified their hybrid actions against Poland recently.”
The dispute arises amid widespread angst about the potential for the Wagner Group, which acquired a reputation as one of the more effective forces in the Russian defense system, to pose a threat to some of the NATO members nearest to Ukraine.
“Any attacks by the Wagner Group will be seen as an attack by the Russian Government,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who leads the U.S. mission to the United Nations, told reporters Monday.
She issued that warning in part to allay Polish anxiety. “The Wagner Group is bigger than the Lithuanian army,” the Polish Interior Ministry’s state secretary, Maciej Wasik, said Monday. “They came to Belarus for a purpose. And they are too expensive to help with the harvest. They will not help to harvest. Lukashenko wants to use them.”
Poland shares a border with Lithuania known as the Suwalki Gap, a 40-mile stretch of ground that separates Belarus from Kaliningrad, which is a sovereign Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea. That border area has long been regarded as a vulnerable and strategic piece of territory, as it figures as the only break in a land corridor from mainland Russia to the southern end of the Baltic Sea.
“Listen, the Suwalki Corridor is not in Belarus,” Lukashenko said Tuesday, per Belarusian state media. “We don’t travel along this corridor or towards the corridor. We don’t need it absolutely. Keeping things calm is the most important thing.”
Lukashenko is perceived as having resisted Russian pressure to order Belarusian forces into the war in Ukraine. Yet the autocrat, who allowed Putin to use his country as a base from which to launch the campaign to overthrow the Ukrainian government, also reiterated “a joke” about the Wagner Group’s desire to attack Rzeszow, the Polish border city that hosts the U.S. forces coordinating military aid deliveries to Ukraine.
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“Weapons and materiel came from Rzeszow to where these Wagner fighters were fighting near Artyomovsk (Bakhmut). Thousands of their guys died there. And they are in no mood to forgive it,” he said. “These guys are willing to fight. … This is why [Polish officials] should pray that we keep them and supply somehow. Otherwise they could have infiltrated Poland and could have delivered a terrible punch to Rzeszow and Warsaw. This is why they shouldn’t reproach me. They should thank me.”
U.S. officials don’t regard Lukashenko as the real authority over Prigozhin’s forces. “So we certainly worry that this group, at the behest of the Russian Government – because they do not work independently of the Russian Government – is a threat to all of us,” she said Monday.
