Kuznica, Poland, on the border with Belarus—Mayor Pawel Miklasz remembers like it was yesterday when Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko—a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin—tried to funnel thousands of primarily Iraqi and Afghan immigrants into the European Union through his quiet farming town in 2021.

A “catastrophe” of chaos and violence broke out in and around the village, Mayor Miklasz recalled, when Poland’s conservative government ordered the military and Polish Border Guard to wage pitched battles, using water hoses, tear gas, and clubs, against the riotous mobs of illegal immigrants constantly mounting violent incursions to break through the Polish police lines.

The Polish forces staved off many thousands for months until a 116-mile steel wall, eighteen feet high and reinforced with barbed wire, electronic sensors, and cameras, finished construction in 2022. That structure, alongside crucial policy changes, restored quiet to the Belarusian forests, although frosty, Cold-War-like relations between the two countries remain.

But a recent shift from the political Right to Left in Poland’s national government now threatens those two-plus years of tranquility in Kuznica and all along Poland’s now-famed steel fence—widely credited as emblematic of how walls stop illegal immigration.

“I’m worried,” the mayor told me. “I can’t tell the future but if we allow these people to come in here freely and without consequence, it will lead to big problems.”

The mayor referred to the October 2023 national elections that swung Poland’s anti-immigration nationalist government toward the immigration-friendly, fence-hostile left. The election came at a time when Russia and Belarus are allied in their hostility toward Poland and the EU over their military assistance to Ukraine. They are no doubt aching to launch another immigration crisis in retaliation, as they recently have against Finland.

Russia and Belarus may be closer to putting the new left-wing Polish government to the test than anyone could have guessed: Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko chose the moment after Poland’s elections to reopen direct air routes from Istanbul, Turkey—a center of refugees and economic migrants—to Minsk, the Belarussian capital.

This is the very same air route Lukashenko used in 2021 to purposefully lure in thousands of migrants from Turkey to flood Kuznica in 2021 to strike at the EU. It should be noted that Minsk has........

© The National Interest