Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk claimed on Nov. 3 that Poland had successfully prevented what appeared, he asserted, to be an attempted provocation on its border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad overnight. He gave few details but said that “individuals with flashlights” had been observed in the border area. The Polish border guards supposedly prevented any incident from happening. “Just after midnight, I received information from the border guards that disturbing movement had been observed on the Polish-Russian border,” Tusk said, reported AP.
“We have been receiving information for some time from our services and from allies’ services that ... acts of diversion or more serious provocations on the border with Russia, or even sabotage acts orchestrated by hostile services, could occur,” Tusk said. He admitted though that it was not possible to confirm with full certainty that the incident was an attempted provocation. He said Russia’s intensified escalation would continue and was unlikely to be limited to this incident.
The Russian response so far has been to tell the Poles to worry about their own problems. “There is absolutely no confirmation whatsoever of any sabotage on the border with Poland originating from the Russian Kaliningrad Region,” Yevgeny Mishin, a member of the Kaliningrad Region’s Legislative Assembly and deputy chairman of its committee on international and interregional relations, security, and law and order, said in an interview with TASS. “We can only advise our neighbors to sort out their own domestic political problems. It seems to me that the Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—as well as Poland, are crossing all boundaries with these fabrications, these utterly mythical tales about nonexistent threats from our side. We certainly do not want to carry out any acts of sabotage against other countries, that’s all just their own speculation.”
TASS notes that rhetoric concerning potential measures against Kaliningrad has intensified in recent months, with threats of an economic and territorial blockade of the region appearing in the foreign press.
