The
“Great Wall of Ukraine” looks nothing like its nickname suggests. It boasts no
stone, brick or tampered earth, you can’t walk along it, and there is little
chance (one would hope) that parts of it will remain standing 2,000 years from
now. It is, however, “a priority”, according to the Ukrainian President, Petro
Poroshenko, and its intended purpose is simple: to keep Russia out and would-be
secessionists in.
Two years ago, the Ukrainians did not need this
“wall”. Or, to put it differently, they did not think they needed it. Times,
however, have changed. The wall – simply an idea 12 months ago, a political
play by Poroshenko in the run-up to elections – is now being marked out. The
first stretch of wire fencing has already gone up in Kharkiv, the northern
region not far from neighbouring Luhansk, where skirmishes are frequent. The
eventual plan, however, is to create something much larger in scale: a boundary
to run the length of Ukraine’s eastern land border with Russia, stretching
1,500 miles, and replete with trenches, watchtowers and armed guards. It will
take an estimated three to four years to build and $500m (£330m) to fund – a
figure of which bankrupt Ukraine is hoping the EU will help to provide at least
a portion in support.
It
will not be the only fence to go up this year. All over Eastern Europe – from
Ukraine, to Poland, to Bulgaria – Soviet-style “iron curtains” are celebrating
a renaissance, with boundaries springing out of the ground in places few would
have expected half a decade ago, and neighbours separating themselves in new
and surprising ways. Poland this month announced plans to harden its border
with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to the north – with six watchtowers to
be put up this year – in a move indicative of worsening relations between
Russia and its contiguous EU states. Meanwhile, further south, in Bulgaria, a
fence topped with razor wire is being erected to stretch the length of the
southern border with Turkey. The goal, according to the administration in
Sofia: to stop the flow of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, and curb
the risk of receiving militants from Syria and Iraq.
“
The
wall is back,” says Professor David Priestland – who lectures in Soviet history
at Oxford University – metaphorically, at least. “There were lots of them in
the Cold War. We thought we’d got rid of them, and now they’re cropping up
again.” The reasons, Priestland says, are twofold: “We’re partly seeing a
militarisation of borders, and we’re also seeing walls going up to stem the
movement of people. We are not in a wonderful world of trading with each other
and moving freely, as it looked like we might be getting towards in the
Nineties. That has not happened.”
It’s hard to disagree. Some 500 miles
from Ukraine, and two countries further south, Bulgaria’s “wall” – built with
entirely different intentions – is even further along in development. It is a
project as ambitious as the US’s reinforcement of its border with Mexico: a
state-of-the-art “integrated monitoring system”, which will see Bulgaria’s
whole southern border with Turkey closely observed by a new task force of 1,500
border police.
“The government’s plan is to make it
stretch 100 miles across the southern border with Turkey. The plan is to finish
by June,” says Boris Cheshirkov, a spokesperson for the UN Refugee Agency
(UNHCR) in Bulgaria. “It’s a chicken-wire fence with barbed-wire rolls in front
of it,” Cheshirkov explains. It’s three metres high. I don’t know what else to
say about it.”
He
could always add that it is a monstrosity. The hardening of the border will
result directly in refugees choosing to seek out more dangerous routes of
travel, and many are predicting a rise in the number of those trying to flee
the Middle East by boat rather than land in the coming months – threatening
more tragedies like those happening right now in Italian waters. “There’s
already an established people-smuggling route from Turkey’s Aegean coast going
into the Mediterranean,” says the Turkish journalist and author Alev Scott.
“We’ll certainly see that sea route becoming used more as a result
of the fence.”
Bulgaria argues that it has good reason
for its actions. Civil war in Syria and the rise of militant groups in the
Levant have taken a toll on the country, which remains one of the EU’s poorest
members. Bulgaria cannot cope with the refugee burden being placed on it simply
as a result of its geographical location, and the country strongly opposes the
EU directive that all refugees are legally restricted to their first EU country
of entry.
It is, in part, a just argument. More
than 15,000 known Syrian refugees have entered Bulgaria illegally since the
beginning of the their civil war, and at least 4,000 are known to be in the
care of refugee centres there. The true number must be much higher; and it’s
hardly surprising that Bulgaria resents taking the bulk of a refugee influx
which its EU neighbours are not sharing.
The
fence, by all accounts, is delivering results. Before work began 16 months ago,
Bulgaria was receiving around 100 refugees per day – the majority of them
Syrians, Kurds, Iraqis and Yazidis. Now, with the first part erected, that
number has already dropped to more like 150 people per week.
However, the real tragedy of its
success, the UNHCR says, is that Bulgaria was just beginning to cope with the
influx of new arrivals at the point that its “containment plan” was signed off
by the government. “In 2013, refugee reception conditions were dire,” Boris
Cheshirkov says. “Now, with the help of the UNHCR and increased EU funding,
those that actually reach the refugee centres are fed twice a day and live in
renovated buildings.”
The irony is that, just as Bulgaria has
begun receiving substantial external support for receiving refugees, it has
also elected to stop letting them in. However, in part, this is a decision
predicated on domestic politics. Anti-immigration sentiment in Bulgaria is
fierce, with groups such as Human Rights Watch routinely reporting incidents of
refugee abuse in the country. This – coupled with a fear that those crossing the
border from Turkey count returning jihadist militants among their ranks – has
engendered strong home-grown support for reinforcing the border.
Still,
the UNHCR implicitly rejects the idea that this approach will materially combat
the spread of militants. “Based on the profile of most of the people we’ve seen
cross the border in the last two years, these are families with small
children,” Boris Cheshirkov says. “They are people with nowhere else to go,
fleeing the horrors of terrorism. This is the main point to make.”
Regardless, the appeal of such policies
remains strong, according to Kalypso Nicolaidis, a professor of international
relations at Oxford University and an expert on European integration. Walls are
“an extreme expression of bordering”, she says. “We already have border guards
and border crossings in Europe and a huge majority of migrants arrive to the
Continent through airports, not over sea or land.” But physical barriers,
“whether they are for militarisation or immigration, respond to a demand for
protection and security. They allow politicians to give the impression that
we’re becoming more secure against external threats”.
Further north of Bulgaria, another
border is being fortified with just that motive in mind. On the upper edge of
Poland, near Gdansk, on a boundary that was becoming ever more porous until a
few months ago, there now lie the first outlines of a massive building plan.
The idea, proposed this month by the Polish authorities, is to erect six
50m-high watchtowers to survey the 200km-long border with Kaliningrad, Russia’s
westernmost territory.
Kaliningrad,
Poland fears, is being heavily armed by Russia: a defence official for the
Kremlin announced in March that the region would shortly be equipped with
Iskander missiles, and Poland is taking the move seriously – as are the Baltic
states farther north. Lithuania’s president has expressed fears that the
ballistic weapons could reach as far as Berlin. Poland, as noted, is responding
by means of a hardened border. The six watchtowers, which will begin going up
in June, will cost 14m zloty (£2.5m) and receive 75 per cent funding from the
EU’s External Borders Fund.
Russia analyst Ben Judah believes the
threat of armament next door is only one of the reasons behind Poland’s
watchtower project. “Kaliningrad and Russia are still very well connected,” he
says. “The Polish government is very twitchy about the fact a train line still
connects Moscow to Kaliningrad. There’s a fear that you could easily see
Russian soldiers, masquerading as rebels, alighting from that train in
Kaliningrad and posing a threat to the whole area.”
If that is a legitimate fear, it’s not
yet one that Poland is willing to recognise. Speaking to EUobserver
newspaper earlier this month, an anonymous spokesperson for the Polish foreign
ministry insisted that the scheme was “designed to prevent illegal crossings
and… not linked to the current situation in Ukraine”.
Yet the hardened border, some think, is
a regression for both territories, given the improved relations between Russia
and Poland in the past half-decade. As recently as 2013, the inhabitants of
Kaliningrad – a piece of Russia since 1945 – dreamt of a visa-free border with
their EU neighbours. There were holidays to the seaside town of Gdansk, weekend
trips to Ikea and Lidl, and even songs appearing on YouTube to celebrate the
softening of the border – all due to a small but important change in Poland’s
border-traffic law which meant that Kaliningradians could cross westwards for
several different trips, without having to travel to Moscow to obtain a visa.
“It’s
very sad to see,” Ben Judah says. “It’s only recently that the Polish
government was pushing for closer engagement with Russia. Kaliningrad and
Poland looked like the likely test ground for visa-free travel between Russia
and some of the EU.”
Judah sees Poland’s watchtower scheme
and the strengthening of the border as indicative of a wider sense of fortress
mentality in the area. Earlier this year, Lithuania announced plans to
reintroduce conscription over concerns about “the current geopolitical
environment in the Baltic states”. Latvia’s defence minister has suggested
similar moves. The Estonians have been almost provocatively defiant: this
February, on the eve of their Independence Day, they paraded a squadron of US
military vehicles through the city of Narva, which juts into Russia, a mere 300
yards from the border. The hardening of the frontier there is of a part with
military refortifications on the borders of Poland and Ukraine: boundaries once
sketched out in pencil are now being firmly re-marked in pen.
Part of the phenomenon, says Stuart
Elden, a professor at Warwick University specialising in contemporary territory
issues, is that such “wall building” can be contagious. “There has been a
noticeable trend in the past few years. The fact that some states are doing it
has led to others doing the same,” he says. “It sends out both a
domestic-policy message and says something to the countries next door. They’re
a retrograde, old-fashioned move, and they’re hard not to notice.”
Still, don’t good fences at least make
good neighbours? Not according to European integration expert Kalypso
Nicolaidis. She says that in all the three main cases – in Ukraine, Bulgaria
and Poland – governments are guilty of making decisions effective only in the
short term. “People don’t really understand that it’s really about what’s
happening at the source. Deal with Russia, deal with the problems that cause
people to travel up from the Middle East and Africa – that’s much more effective,”
she says. “But in citizens’ imaginations, walls have an imaginative quality
which politicians tend to pander to. They seem like the easier
solution.”
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