‘Barbed wire curtain’ in, hope out
Brutal Ukraine conflict, weaponised migration destroy trust in Moscow
The long border between Finland and Russia runs through thick forests and is marked only by wooden posts with low fences meant to stop stray cattle. Soon, a stronger, higher fence will be erected on parts of the frontier.
Polish soldiers are laying coils of razor wire on the border with Kaliningrad, a part of Russian territory separated from the country and wedged between Poland and Lithuania. Cameras and an electronic monitoring system also will be installed in the area once guarded only by occasional border-guard patrols.
The Berlin Wall’s fall more than 30 years ago symbolised hope for cooperation with Moscow. Now, Russia’s war in Ukraine has ushered in a new era of confrontation in Europe — and the rise of new barriers of steel, concrete and barbed wire. These are being built by the West.
“The Iron Curtain is gone, but the ‘barbed wire curtain’ is now unfortunately becoming the reality for much of Europe,” said Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. “The optimism . . . after 1989 is very much now gone.”
There was euphoria when Germans danced atop the Berlin Wall and broke off chunks of the barrier erected in 1961 by Communist leaders. It stretched for 155km until 1989, when East German authorities opened crossings after mass protests. Within a year, East and West Germany were reunited.
Some countries in the European Union began building border fences as a response to more than one million refugees and other migrants entering southern Europe from the Middle East and Africa in 2015 alone. In 2015 and 2016, Russia ushered thousands of asylum-seekers, also mostly from the Middle East, to border checkpoints in northern Finland.
When relations with Belarus deteriorated after its authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko was declared winner of the 2020 election widely seen as fraudulent, the government in Minsk sent thousands of migrants across the EU’S frontiers in what Dodds called “hybrid warfare”. Poland and Lithuania erected walls along their borders with Belarus.
Michal Baranowski, head of the Warsaw office of the German Marshal Fund think tank, said most security analysts believed Belarus coordinated its effort with Moscow, “in effect destabilising our borders ahead of war in Ukraine”.
Fearing another migration crisis as a response to sanctions against Moscow because of the war in Ukraine, European leaders are hardening their borders.
Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin announced plans to fortify parts of her country’s 1340km border.
Moscow has threatened “serious military-political consequences” against Finland and Sweden for seeking to join Nato, and Marin said the fortifications would help defend against the “hybrid threat” of possible large-scale and irregular migration orchestrated by the Kremlin.
The new barriers offer little protection from missiles or tanks. Governments instead expect the walls, fences and electronic surveillance to provide better control of their borders and to stop large migrant surges.
Dodds says Russia has weaponised migration for years as it engages in a “civilisation conflict with its European neighbours”.
Russia bombed and harassed Syria’s population in 2015 “in a deliberate attempt to create a humanitarian crisis”, he said.
“I think one of the difficulties we sometimes have outside of Russia is in actually appreciating quite how cynical, quite how calculating, quite how deliberate some of this work is,” said Dodds, author of The New Border Wars: The Conflicts that Will Define Our Future.
Russia’s use of migrants to create social discord in places such as Poland, Lithuania and Latvia has led to those governments not giving them the chance to apply for asylum and refusing them entry in many cases, as has happened in other countries such as Greece and Hungary.
Human-rights activists in Poland have protested the the 5½-metre steel wall erected along 186km of its border with Belarus, arguing that it keeps out only the weakest. Anna Alboth of the Minority Rights Group said people used ladders or dug tunnels.
Since the wall was finished last summer, about 1800 migrants who made it inside Poland and found themselves in forests desperate for food, water or medicine, have contacted Grupa Granica, an umbrella organisation Alboth cofounded.
“I had a situation where I went to one group and I stepped on people who were half-conscious,” she said.
She recently encountered groups of women from Sudan who appeared to be human-trafficking victims, as well as med students from Africa who were in their fifth year of studies in Russia.
“They said ‘Russia is falling apart and we want to live in a normal country’,” Alboth said.
Polish government security official Stanislaw Zaryn agreed the border wall didn’t stop everyone, but added: “It does allow our forces to act rapidly and more efficiently, without the need to deploy as much manpower as before.”
AP