Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in 2024. Photo / Alexander Kazakov, Pool via AFP
Russia is sending migrants through underground tunnels from Belarus into Europe as part of its hybrid war on the West.
Belarus, a Russian puppet state led by dictator Alexander Lukashenko, has used specialists from the Middle East with “a high level of expertise” to design the tunnels, Polish officials have told the Telegraph.
The Great Escape-style tactic marks a new escalation in the Kremlin’s hybrid war on Europe, in which Minsk has tried to send tens of thousands of migrants across Poland’s eastern frontier.
Polish officials said the specialists who designed and dug the tunnels had a “high level of expertise”.
And while experts say it is hard to be sure which groups were involved, they have suggested Kurdish fighters, Isis, and Iranian-backed proxies as potential culprits.
Poland has also suggested that Belarus resorted to hiring the mysterious Middle Eastern specialists because it was seeking new and more inventive methods of sneaking migrants across the border.
“Officers of the Podlaskie Border Guard Unit have uncovered a total of four tunnels under the border with Belarus, all in 2025,” Lieutenant Colonel Katarzyna Zdanowicz, from the Polish border force, told the Telegraph.
“Physical and electronic security measures at the border, such as thermal imaging cameras and detection systems, allow us to immediately respond to any attempted violations of the state border, even underground ones,” he added.
Polish authorities discovered one of the largest tunnels, near the village of Narewka in eastern Poland, in mid-December.
It was used by a total of 180 migrants, mainly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the majority of them arrested after they emerged on the other side.
According to Poland, the tunnel was 1.5m-high with the entrance on the Belarusian side hidden in a forest. The tunnel ran for around 50m on the Belarusian side of the border and for 10m on the Polish side.
Polish police also released images of some of the 130 migrants who were arrested after emerging from the tunnels.
Video footage of the tunnel itself shows a narrow crawlspace-like structure, with concrete struts fixed to the sides to prevent it from collapsing.
Military experts say the only Middle Eastern groups known to be capable of such tunnels are Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, certain factions in Kurdistan, and possibly Isis.
Dr Lynette Nusbacher, an American military historian and strategist, said it was “plausible” that Iranian-backed groups such as Hezbollah might be the culprits.
“One of the things we immediately saw after the 2006 Lebanon war was parades of cement mixers queuing up in southern Lebanon ... We were seeing loads and loads of Iranian tunnel construction,” she said.
“We also have ample evidence of Hamas doing the same thing in Gaza. So if you want that deep tunnelling expertise, then the answer to your question is going to be with Middle Easterners.”
Major Rob Campbell, a fortifications expert and former British Army sapper, also said Hamas was a possible culprit after reviewing footage of the tunnels in Poland.
“If I had to speculate, experts from the Middle East would be Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” he said, referring to another Palestinian faction in the Gaza Strip.
Sarit Zehavi, a former Israeli intelligence colonel, said Iranian-backed proxies were just one of several possible explanations.
“Does Hezbollah or any Iranian proxies have this capability? Yes. Are they the only ones? No. Probably others also have the knowledge, from Kurdish militias in Syria to Isis,” she said.
Marcin Kierwinski, a Polish official, has previously said that some of the tunnellers came from Kurdistan, but added that Poland ultimately holds the Belarusian regime responsible.
Last month, Al-Jazeera, the Qatari broadcaster, reported the discovery of a vast network of tunnels below the Syrian city of Raqqa, which had been dug by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Under Lukashenko, who has ruled for more than 30 years, Belarus has played an active role in Putin’s attempts to destabilise the West via waves of migration.
Even prior to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Belarus was used as a staging area to send thousands of migrants across the Polish border, prompting Warsaw to build a 200km fence with 300 cameras.
Since the full-scale Ukraine invasion, Russia has also launched dozens of drone incursions and firebomb attacks on European airports, as well as a string of sabotage attacks on factories and railways supplying aid to Ukraine.
The ultimate goal is to punish the West over its military support for Ukraine and try to turn the public against Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Government in Kyiv.
As a wider part of that strategy, Belarus has been sending waves of balloons carrying contraband into neighbouring Nato countries to create air traffic chaos and probe for air defence weaknesses.
The tactic initially targeted Lithuania, but Polish officials say Belarusian balloons – usually loaded with bootleg cigarettes – are increasingly being sent in their direction.
When it comes to dealing with the tunnels, Poland says it is more than capable of tracking down the entrances and blowing them up.
But there are concerns that, each time Warsaw closes off one access point to Europe for migrants, another one springs up elsewhere.
“Digging these tunnels means that our effectiveness in stopping migration is so high that it was decided to bring in specialists from the Middle East to dig them,” said Czesław Mroczek, the deputy interior minister, in a recent interview on Polish radio.
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