Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki is freaking out over the reported deployment of around 100 Wagner fighters near the Suwalki Corridor. According to him, “They will probably be disguised as Belarusian border guards and will help illegal immigrants to enter Polish territory, destabilize Poland, but they will also probably try to infiltrate Poland pretending to be illegal immigrants and this creates additional risks.” His paranoid overreaction is actually quite revealing for the five reasons that will now be explained.
Before doing so, however, it’s important to direct readers to five background analyses:
* “There’s Nothing Conspiratorial About Putin Meeting With Wagner Leaders After The Failed Coup”
* “Fake News Alert: Wagner Isn’t Going To Invade The Suwalki Corridor”
* “The Latest Polish-Belarusian Border Tensions Actually Advance Both Of Their Interests”
* “Putin Exposed Poland’s Regional Plans In An Attempt To Deter Them”
* “Is Wagner About To Go Rogue Again?”
They clarify the Kremlin’s relationship with Wagner and update everyone on Polish-Belarusian relations.
Those readers who reviewed them will thus be up to speed and more able to understand the insight that’ll now be shared. To begin with, Morawiecki showed how much Poland fears Wagner otherwise he wouldn’t be making a proverbial mountain out of a molehill after only just around 100 of its fighters were reportedly deployed near the Suwalki Corridor. This observation confirms that Wagner is indeed among the world’s most effective warfighting groups nowadays and a force to be reckoned with.
The second detail that the Polish premier’s reaction inadvertently revealed is his fear of another migrant crisis like the one his country experienced from Belarus in late 2021, which was accused of employing “Weapons of Mass Migration” as revenge for Warsaw’s role in summer 2020’s failed regime change plot. 100 Wagner fighters wouldn’t make much of a difference in the larger scheme of things if a similar such crisis soon breaks out, however, unless that group really goes rogue again and tries crossing the border.
The third takeaway is that publicly speaking about the aforesaid scenario like Morawiecki just did serves Polish interests by justifying its threatening military buildup along the Belarusian border. It could also be intended to exploit nationalist sentiment ahead of this fall’s elections in a bid to help the ruling party win re-election in the face of a surprisingly formidable challenge from the opposition. In any case, there aren’t any credible grounds to suspect Wagner of fomenting another migrant crisis.
The fourth detail that Morawiecki accidentally shared in his paranoid overreaction to the latest report about this group’s activities in Belarus is that he doesn’t seriously think that they’ll try to cross the border in uniform but might try to infiltrate it. In other words, prior reports about their alleged plans to invade the Suwalki Corridor aren’t even extended credence by the Polish premier, though Warsaw will definitely continue exploiting these fears for the abovementioned purposes.
And finally, his freakout proved that mere rumors about Wagner can have disproportionate effects in the region. Not only is Poland ramping up its threatening military buildup along the Belarusian border on this pretext, but Morawiecki’s warning that a new migrant crisis might soon break out could instill a lot of fear in his fellow Poles, most of whom are afraid of civilizationally dissimilar migrants. These interconnected developments were set into motion by unverified reports, which is worth reflecting on.
