Senior government officials in Helsinki and Warsaw called out the illegal migration problem coming to Europe from the Middle East and Africa, labeling it as an example of Russian “hybrid warfare” meant to destabilize their countries.
Finnish Minister of Defense Antti Häkkänen specifically accused Russia of “shaking up” his country by transporting thousands of migrants, mostly from Islamic countries, to its shared border with the Nordic nation.
“Russia started in 2015 instrumentalizing this migration. For example, they gather people from African and Middle Eastern countries to our Lapland, Arctic borders,” Häkkänen explained to Breitbart News.
Häkkänen, a member of the center-right National Coalition Party, went on to lambast the Russians for orchestrating the movement of thousands of migrants, which included bussing them to the Finnish border and “pushing them to our areas.”
“Their main objective was to use these people — by shaking up our country with thousands of people,” the defense minister continued, before noting that Finland swiftly closed their borders in response to the 2015 influx, causing Russia to direct migrants to other states in the European Union.
“[To] Finnish borders, they managed to bring only some several hundreds before we closed our borders,” Häkkänen said. “In 2015, we managed to handle the situation, but now, when they started two years ago again, we closed the border with new legislation — fully. And then we sent the signal — ‘Sorry, Russia, the people are staying at your country, at your cities.’”
According to the defense minister, Russian citizens became concerned with the migrants gathering in their own cities after being stopped at the Finnish border — so they redirected them towards Poland and the smaller Baltic countries via their allies in Belarus.
Both Finnish and Polish officials labeled this phenomenon as Russian “hybrid warfare,” defined as non-military acts designed to subvert and threaten the social cohesion of its adversaries.
A spokesperson with the Polish Armed Forces’ 18th Mechanized Division, a unit that guards Poland’s shared border with Belarus, told Breitbart News that the Russian-backed illegal migration began intensifying in July 2021.
With the support of Moscow, the Belarusian government funneled thousands of migrants from countries like Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan to the Polish border, offering them visas so they could have an easy route into the EU.
Poland responded by constructing a metal border barrier equipped with barbed wire and electronic monitoring, which was completed in 2025. Still, migrants use violent tactics to try to enter the country. The June 2024 death of a 21-year-old Polish soldier who was fatally stabbed by a migrant at the border shook many in Warsaw.
According to the military spokesperson, tens of thousands of border crossing attempts were recorded in the last five years, but the deterrence has led to under 800 so far in 2026.
In an apparent reference to President Donald Trump’s famous name for the barrier constructed along the U.S.-Mexico border, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister Radosław Sikorski called his own country’s barrier a “big, beautiful fence.”
“We would like the U.S. public to know that we are actually tougher on the border,” Sikorski told Breitbart News, before adding that Poles are not sorry for constructing the fence to fight against Russian hybrid warfare.
“It was a big threat, and we don’t apologize for doing it… we hope to inspire the rest of Europe,” Sikorski stated. “We think we’re an example to follow… it’s the prerogative of a nation-state to decide who comes in.”
He also emphasized that he does not hold a double standard for his fellow countrymen who may illegally immigrate themselves.
“Poles who have overstated their visas [in the U.S.] — we have absolutely no problem with them being sent back,” Sikorski remarked.
In a separate statement, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Bosacki told Breitbart News that the illegal immigration problem was “created artificially by Belarus and Russia,” reporting that the two countries had created a targeted campaign to get third-world migrants into the EU.
“This is a totally artificial path created in ’21 by [Belarusian President Aleksandr] Lukashenko and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Bosacki continued. “So they’re flying people from the Middle East and North Africa, from Cairo, from Istanbul, to either Moscow or Minsk, and then being passed into Poland into the Belarusian-Polish border, also the Belarusian-Lithuanian border, and Belarusian-Latvian border.”
The deputy minister explained that the Russians and Belarusians have led these migrants to believe that they will “go freely into the heaven” of the EU, but “this is no longer true.”
“We really secured our border,” Bosacki said.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.