Cabinet member: Poland to keep border checks with Germany, Lithuania

Poland plans to extend the checks at its borders with Germany and Lithuania, Cabinet member Tomasz Siemoniak said on Thursday.

Under the rules of the Schengen area, the border checks - which began on July 7 - should expire after an initial 30 days, he told TVN24 television.

"They will certainly be extended," he added.

Siemoniak has been interior minister since May 2024 but is being replaced by Marcin Kierwiński as part of a major Cabinet reshuffle. He is to remain coordinator of the special services and responsible for irregular migration.

In the first two weeks of the measures, the Polish border guard said it had turned away 100 people who were trying to enter the country irregularly from Germany or Lithuania.

Spot checks have been carried out on around 280,000 people and 134,200 vehicles since July 7, the border guard wrote on X on Wednesday.

In his television interview, Siemoniak said Russia and Belarus are weaponizing migration as part of their hybrid attack on Poland and the European Union.

"The migrants fly to Moscow with Russian visas. Then they are taken by bus to the Polish border, where the Belarusian authorities tell them what to do," he said. "And then they try to enter Poland."

Poland introduced the checks in response to German border controls, which have been in place since October 2023.

The government in Warsaw was under pressure from right-wing vigilante groups, which claimed that Germany was sending refugees to Poland. These groups began their own patrols on the border in an attempt to find irregular migrants.