Warsaw may introduce checks on its border with Lithuania, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Monday. Meanwhile, Lithuania’s State Border Guard Service (VSAT) says Lithuanian officials have not been informed of any such plans.
Tusk said at a press conference on Monday that the government had invested “a lot of effort, money, sweat and, unfortunately, some blood, to make the eastern border with Belarus air-tight”, according to PAP.
He said “measures will be taken so that people who cross borders illegally do not come from the Lithuanian direction”.
Tusk made the announcement while commenting on the Polish-German border, where Poland may also introduce checks.
“We have informed the German side that if there are cases that we see as doubtful, we’ll have to reinstate checks at the Polish-German border,” Tusk said, referring to reports that Germany may be sending irregular migrants to Poland.
These reports have spurred right-wing groups in Poland to organise the so-called Civic Guard units to ‘patrol’ the border crossings with Germany.
Lithuania has not been officially informed about Warsaw’s plans, VSAT spokesman Giedrius Mišutis said, adding that migrants who may be crossing into Poland from Lithuania are “secondary”, their first point of entry into the EU was not through Lithuania.
“Those migrants who are apprehended by the Poles have illegally crossed the Belarusian-Latvian border, not the Belarusian-Lithuanian border,” Mišutis told BNS.
More than 300 people have already been detained this year, he said. Most of them were caught in Lithuania. And the number of attempts to cross the border in Latvia is also much higher than in Lithuania, he added.
A total of 890 migrants have been refused entry into Lithuania this year. Last year, 1,002 attempts were made to enter the country from Belarus in non-designated areas.
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