The Telegraph: Underground tunnels built in Belarus for smuggling foreigners into the EU. They were designed by people from the Middle East.
In 2025, four underground tunnels were discovered at the Belarusian-Polish border, through which foreigners were being smuggled en masse into Europe. This was reported to the British newspaper The Telegraph by the Polish border guard, as cited by Meduza.
One of the largest tunnels, discovered in mid-December, was located near the village of Narewka in eastern Poland. It was 60 meters long and one and a half meters high. A total of 180 people used it, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most of them (130 people) were arrested after they emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the border.
According to Polish authorities, people from the Middle East with a "high level of qualification" were involved in the design of the underground tunnels in Belarus. Military experts interviewed by the publication believe that the construction of the tunnels may have been linked to terrorists from Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Islamic State.
"Such tactics mark a new escalation of the Kremlin's hybrid war against Europe, in which Minsk attempted to smuggle tens of thousands of migrants across the eastern border of Poland," The Telegraph writes.
Even before 2022, Belarus was used as a transit point for sending thousands of foreigners across the Polish border, prompting Warsaw to build a 200-kilometer fence with 300 surveillance cameras, the publication recalls.
