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Poland to close Belarus border crossing after journalist jailed | News

The announcement comes after a Belarusian court sentenced a Polish-born journalist to eight years in prison.

Poland will close an important border crossing with Belarus until further notice, Poland’s interior minister said, as relations between Warsaw and Minsk reach a new low.

Already strained relations between Poland and Belarus were further strained on Wednesday when a Polish-born journalist was sentenced by a Belarusian court to eight years in prison in a trial that Warsaw said was politically motivated.

“Due to important national security interests, I have decided to suspend until further notice from 1200 [11:00 GMT] on February 10 of this year, traffic at the Polish-Belarusian border crossing in Bobrowniki,” Mariusz Kaminski wrote on Twitter.

Bobrowniki, more than 200km (125 miles) northeast of Warsaw, is one of the main intersections between Poland and Belarus.

Anton Bychkovsky, a spokesman for the Belarusian state border agency, said the move was illegitimate and could overload the remaining border crossings, Russia’s TASS news agency reported.

Bychkovsky told Belarusian channel STV that only two of the six main border posts would be operational, which he said would harm truckers and residents, according to TASS.

“The Belarusian side sees no objective reason to make such a decision because there is no threat from Belarusian territory,” TASS quoted him as saying.

Kaminski also said that since journalist Andrzej Poczobut was jailed, he would apply to add people with ties to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to the sanctions list.

Poland’s state news agency PAP reported that a Belarusian court on Monday convicted Poczobut of “inciting hatred against religious and national groups, and at the same time restoring fascism”.

The Polish Charge d’Affaires in Minsk has been summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belarus, a spokesman for the Polish Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.

Poland has become a major haven for Lukashenko’s opponents as well as one of Ukraine’s most staunch allies ever since. Belarus ally Russia invaded the country last February.

Russia used Belarus as a springboard for its eventual aborted assault on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

In 2021, Poland and the European Union said Belarus had orchestrated a refugee crisis on their borders, an allegation Minsk denied. More recently, Poland has condemned the vandalism of Polish graves in Belarus.

Thousands of people of Polish descent live in Belarus because the west of the country was Polish territory until the border was redrawn after World War II.



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