The Polish Border Service has announced a tender for the construction of a fence with electronic tracking systems on the border with Belarus on the Bug River, said the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic Mariusz Kamiński.
“The Border Service has announced a tender for the construction of an electronic fence on the Bug River. Its length will be 172 km,” the official said.
He clarified that the electronic barrier will include approximately 4.5 thousand cameras, thermal imagers and motion sensors operating around the clock.
Polish companies can apply to participate until September 22, 2023. The winner will be announced by mid-November so that the selected contractor can begin construction this year.
The chief commandant of the Polish border service, Tomasz Praga, emphasized that, in his opinion, the electronic barrier is “an innovative solution that will allow guarding the border 24 hours a day and normal use of the river.”
Following the migration crisis in 2021, Poland built a 5.5-meter-high and 186-kilometer-long wall on its border with Belarus. The fortification consists of several lines of defense and is equipped with modern electronic devices, including motion sensors and day and night vision cameras.
Issues of strengthening the security of the border with Belarus in Poland are also being raised against the backdrop of the movement of mercenaries from the Wagner PMC to Belarus, who, together with the Belarusian military, carried out “combat training tasks” near the Polish border in the second half of July. Alexander Lukashenko, three days after the announcement of the exercises, at a meeting with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, said that he was allegedly keeping the Wagner PMC mercenaries from marching on Warsaw, and a week later he called these words a joke.
A similar fence with a length of 199 km was erected on the border with Russia (Kaliningrad region). The height of the fence is 2.5 meters, it consists of three rows of fences. Construction of the electronic barrier began this year. The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the coordinating minister of the special services, Mariusz Kaminski, said that it will be the most modern, and the Polish authorities will receive “full monitoring of what is happening on the border with Russia.”
Poland also announced an increase in the number of military personnel on the border with Belarus to ten thousand. Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said the department would redeploy troops “closer to the border with Belarus to deter the aggressor so that he does not decide to attack” Poland.
