Polish Border Guard signs an agreement to install a fence on border with Belarus

WARSAW (TASS): The Polish Border Guard has signed three contracts with contractors for the construction of a fence on the border with Belarus. This was stated on Tuesday at a briefing by the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland, Maciej Wonsik.
“Today the border guards signed agreements,” he said, stressing that “three major agreements on the construction of the fence have been signed.”
According to him, the length of the fence will be 186 km. Construction will be carried out simultaneously on four sites. It will take 50 tons of steel.
Poland announced plans to build a five-meter fence equipped with modern surveillance equipment on the border with Belarus, amid the migration crisis. For this project, almost 1.5 billion zlotys (over $ 370 million) will be allocated from the Polish budget. The total length of the Polish-Belarusian border is 418 km. Most of it runs along the Bug River.
The crisis on the borders of Belarus with Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, where migrants have rushed since the beginning of last year, sharply escalated on November 8. Several thousand people approached the Polish border from the Belarusian side, some of them tried to get into Poland by force, breaking through the bar-bed wire fence. In recent m-onths, migrants have periodically tried to enter Pol-ish territory in small gro-ups. In total, over the past year, about 40 thousand attempts by illegal migrants to illegally enter Poland from Belarus were recorded. A year earlier, there were only 122 of them.