Poland will station 10,000 troops at the border with Belarus to back up the border guard,  Defence Minister Mariusz Błaszczak said, PAP, a Polish news agency, reported on August 10.

He revealed the plan in an interview with public broadcaster Polish Radio on Augus 10.

The defence minister said: “About 10,000 soldiers will be on the border, of which 4,000 will directly support the Border Guard and 6,000 will be in the reserve."

According to him, the Polish army moves closer to the border with Belarus to scare away the aggressor so that it does not dare to attack Poland.

As reported by bne IntelliNews, on August 9, Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Wąsik said that Poland would deploy 2,000 extra troops to bolster its border with Belarus.

It came after hundreds of Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries had relocated to Belarus in July, at the invitation of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczynski has described the Wagner Group as “an extremely dangerous armed force” and “a Russian tool”.

Meanwhile, Belarus continues its military exercises near the border this week, and Lukashenko has said several times that he was restraining Wagner fighters who want to attack Poland.

Moreover, Poland has seen an increase in attempts to illegally cross into the country from Belarus, mainly by migrants from the Middle East and Africa,.

Tomasz Praga, the head of the Border Guard agency, said that there had been 19,000 attempts to cross illegally into Poland from Belarus this year, compared with less than 16,000 in the whole of 2022, PAP said.