Lithuania’s State Border Guard Service (VSAT) is considering installing physical barriers on the border with Belarus in marshy areas as well.
Currently, fences and razor wire cover around 550 km of Lithuania’s 679-kilomere border with Belarus. More than 100 km of the border runs along rivers, lakes and swamps where the zone is monitored with CCTV cameras and other technical means, but there are no fences.
“The VSAT has set up a working group to look into the possibility of installing physical barriers there and calculating costs and weighing options,” Giedrius Mišutis, spokesman for the border service, told BNS.
According to him, fences have a significant impact on stopping irregular migration across the Lithuania-Belarus border.
“Additional physical obstacles would be effective, both now and in the future,” he said. “As we see the situation when we have zero [attempts to cross the border] and as we see what is happening at the Latvian border, which is four times shorter, this is one of the consequences of the fact that the Belarusians are not pushing migrants in this direction now. That is why the significance of the barrier is also very high.”
Latvia has been reporting dozens of attempts to cross their border from the Belarusian side daily, Mišutis pointed out.
In late August, the VSAT reported an incident on the border with Belarus where there was no fence. Two non-uniformed people crossed into Lithuania in Varėna District, near the Čepkeliai Marsh, and cut down two poles with CCTV cameras.
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It was a third such case this year, according to the VSAT. The service recorded a total of 467 attempts to damage the surveillance systems and the barrier last year, and there have been more than fifty such cases so far this year.
Lithuania decided to build a fence along its border with Belarus after experiencing a surge in irregular migration in 2021. Vilnius has accused the Minsk government of migrant smuggling, calling it a “hybrid attack”.
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