Poland-Belarus Borderlands: How a Forest Is Made Lethal

Dispersing responsibility The report turns on the word “knowingly”, and Czarnota is careful about its limits. “We are not saying that the Polish state deliberately created a system intended to cause deaths,” she said. “But once the first deaths and disappearances began to occur in 2021 and 2022, the consequences of this policy were already known. And yet the policy did not change; if anything, it became harsher.” Donald Tusk campaigned in 2023 on ending rights violations at the border. In office, however, his government left in place the rules, introduced by its predecessor in 2021, that allow the Border Guard to return people to the border line. When it began speaking of “humanitarian pushbacks”, Czarnota says, “it became clear to us that the practice wasn’t changing – only the narrative around state responsibility.” In March 2025, the government temporarily suspended the right to claim asylum for people crossing from Belarus, with exceptions for vulnerable groups. Legal measures, policy changes and infrastructure, she says, have created “a kind of hidden zone of violence, where people are effectively deprived of legal protection.” Belarus opened the migrant route in 2021 via issuing visas and laying on flights to Minsk in order to foment a border crisis in retaliation for EU sanctions. The report’s authors are “highly critical” of Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime, but argue that it could exploit migrants only because of conditions Poland and the EU had created. “Poland and the EU have fallen into a trap of their own making, which Belarus has activated,” Heller says. The report’s recommendations follow from that diagnosis. The authors argue that a lasting end to the violence – and to the exploitation of migration by states such as Belarus – would require a fundamental shift in Polish and EU policy, including an end to what they call the framing of migrants as a threat, and the creation of safe and legal routes into Europe. The first step would be to heed the victims and their families, who have repeatedly demanded accountability. “We have become obsessed with understanding migration through the language of controlling migrants, rather than controlling how the system itself operates towards them,” Czarnota says. The trouble is that pushbacks can leave little in the way of a paper trail. In December 2023, Poland’s Ombudsman noted that under the procedure used to return people to the border, the Border Guard does not record their personal data, age, health condition or disability. Unlike another return procedure regulated by the Aliens Act, information about those subjected to these pushbacks does not appear in Border Guard documentation. Meaningful accountability, Czarnota argues, would mean examining the whole chain of events behind each death or disappearance, and the part played in it by individual officers, rather than treating every case as an isolated medical event. Meanwhile, for long stretches since 2021, human rights monitors and rescue teams have been barred from the border area or allowed only limited access – first under a state of emergency, later within a buffer zone introduced in 2024 – and people who help migrants have faced criminal charges. “We do not write this report with any illusions,” Heller says. Their recommendations run against the direction of Polish and European politics, and the authors know it. The hope, he adds, is that it “can constitute a wake-up call”. Poland’s Interior Ministry has rejected the report’s findings. “Responsibility for the situation of foreigners attempting to cross the Polish-Belarusian border illegally lies with the authorities of Russia and Belarus who created it, and with the smuggling networks linked to them,” the ministry tells BIRN in a statement, adding that the report “distorts the picture” and ignores the “hybrid attack” waged by Minsk in cooperation with Moscow. The ministry cites nearly 3 billion zloty (686 million euros) spent on barriers and the Border Guard, and says there had been 472 attempts to cross the border illegally between January 1 and September 13 this year, compared with 25,519 in the same period of 2025 – a fall of 98 per cent. It argues that migrants had received medical and humanitarian aid throughout the crisis, and that the report’s authors had not cited available Border Guard rescue data. The ministry did not answer BIRN’s question about whether it holds aggregate data on deaths and disappearances at the border. Poland publishes no official count of them; the most complete records have been compiled by civil society groups. “This system is designed to protect state actors against accountability,” Czarnota says. “Responsibility is dispersed: nature is blamed, the environment is blamed, and migrants themselves are blamed for having put themselves in danger by attempting to cross the border.” In this reading, the landscape hides the chain of responsibility as effectively as it hides the people crossing it. The report ends with Mahlet Kassa, who died in the forest in February 2023 after, the authors say, Polish border guards failed to help her. For her uncle, Seyoume Shashego, the case remains open. The family knows why she died, he says, “and yet no one does anything about it.”