A war between Poland and Russia’s long-time close ally Belarus could break out at any time, say Polish defense officials. The frontline NATO-member nation shares a more than 300-mile border with the small, former Soviet Republic, run by a strongman, President-for-Life Aleksandr Lukashenko.
Poland vs. Belarus Could Mean NATO vs. Russia
Su-57 Felon Fighter from Russia
What has raised increased concerns among the Poles in the past few years is the development of a new form of warfare that Belarus is now engaged in.
Illegal migrants from Third World nations are being weaponized by Lukashenko and his Russian ally, Vladimir Putin.
The two nations, say analysts watching what has transpired since 2021, are using these migrants to engage in a campaign to destabilize NATO’s eastern flank.
These illegal migrants are largely from Middle Eastern nations, as well as from Asia, and most are young men. They are brought to Belarus by smugglers, who then use Lukashenko’s border guard force to push them across into Poland.
Lukashenko has orchestrated the weaponization of these migrants, charge Poland and other EU nations. His actions appear to be a retaliatory response to EU sanctions imposed on Minsk over what has been recognized as a fraudulent August 2020 presidential election in Belarus.
The sanctions were imposed not only in response to Lukashenko’s discredited re-election, but also due to a brutal crackdown by Belarus security forces on mass protests in the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities.
Thousands have ended up incarcerated without due process or being “convicted” in show trials.
They Are Coming Here
Poland’s leadership is now warning Washington that a majority of these illegals who have managed to enter the EU are continuing on their way through Europe and are then finding a means of illegally entering the United States.
Tu-160M Bombers from Russia. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Warsaw thus describes these actions by Belarus as an ongoing war not just against them, but against the Western alliance as a whole.
These actions have serious implications for American security. With the 28 February beginning of the US and Israel war against Iran, there has been a heightened level of incidents in which pro-Iran actors are engaging in terrorist acts on American soil.
A March 2026 story in Time magazine reported that a gunman opened fire at a bar in Austin, Texas, on the day after the initial strikes on Iran on 28 February. The gunman killed three people and injured more than a dozen others in what was investigated as potentially an act of terrorism.
The suspected gunman was reported to be “wearing a t-shirt with an Iranian flag design at the time of the attack,” and that “the war [in Iran] was being investigated as a motive for the shooting.”
On Thursday of the same week, a pro-Iranian hacker group claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on the major American medical technology company Stryker. The pro-Iran hackers stated that the incident was “retaliation” for a deadly missile strike on an elementary school in Iran.
“It is pretty clear what is happening,” said a retired US military officer working in Poland now. “This country is being used as a transit point for a pipeline of terrorists headed into the EU and then back home to the US.”
A Dutch soldier shoots from a machine gun during Exercise Scorpion Strike, held by NATO forces in Lithuania on Feb. 21, 2018. Dutch forces, along with those of six other NATO Allies, make up the enhanced Forward Presence battlegroup in Lithuania. Together with battlegroups in Poland, Latvia and Estonia, they demonstrate NATO’s commitment to collective defence. Image Credit: NATO Flickr.
Potential Flash Point
The border with Belarus was once patrolled and guarded by Poland’s Border Guard service, the Straż Graniczna (SG), and local police units.
But since 2021, when Belarus began escalating the scale of – and its state support for – these illegal crossings, the Polish military has been brought in to address the problem.
Officials in Warsaw said their military was deployed because the situation with Belarus had become too large and dangerous to be handled as a conventional immigration challenge. Today, the frontier is secured by a layered defense in which soldiers, border guards, and rapid-response forces are deployed in separate echelons to be able to handle any breakthrough by illegals that could pierce one of these layers of the immediate defenses at the border.
In addition, a temporary barrier originally constructed by Poland in 2021 has been replaced by an electronic fence. That fence is supported by a network of surveillance systems and also military patrols that regularly verify the integrity of the border controls.
Polish officials have also provided a cross-section profile of the points of origin for many of these illegal migrants trying to violate the border. Many of them come from African and Middle Eastern states, but there are significant numbers also from Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.
NATO Has A Bigger Problem To Worry About
The primary worry for the moment is that with Poland as a NATO member, any further escalation of this attack on its border could potentially result in Warsaw claiming a violation of the NATO Article V clause. In such an event, the entirety of NATO’s membership would be obligated to come to Poland’s aid and retaliate against these Belarusian provocations.
But Belarus has also been an official ally of Russia, part of a Union State alliance in place since April 1997 that aligns the two nations’ security arrangements.
More recently, the mutual obligations of the two states to come to one another’s aid were strengthened in an agreement signed in December 2024 – more than two years after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“It is not hard to see a Russia-NATO war coming to pass – but by accident and over some incident that starts out small but then mushrooms out of control,” said the retired US military officer. “It would not be the first time in history.”
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two consecutive awards for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
