London – Rome: Europe and the Arabs
Russia has enlisted experts from the Middle East to build underground tunnels in Belarus to smuggle migrants into Europe, according to the British newspaper The Telegraph, which cited Polish sources. According to officials in Warsaw, Moscow has employed experts with a “high level of experience” to design tunnels that exploit migrant flows to destabilize the European continent as part of its hybrid war against Europe.

It is not easy to pinpoint the exact identities of these specialists, but The Telegraph reported, citing military experts, that the only groups with this type of expertise are the Palestinian Hamas movement, the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, some Kurdish fighting factions, and possibly the Islamic State. Polish border guards discovered four such tunnels on the border with Belarus in 2025. According to the Italian news site Nova, one of these tunnels was discovered in mid-December near Narivka, in Poland's Podlaskie district. It had been used by up to 180 migrants, mostly Afghans and Pakistanis, who were apprehended as they crossed from the Polish side of the border. The tunnel was 1.5 meters high and approximately 50 meters long on the Belarusian side and about 10 meters long on the Polish side, the report stated. Russia and Belarus have been exploiting migrant flows, particularly along the Polish-Belarusian border and the borders with the Baltic republics, since before Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Belarus has been used as a staging ground for thousands of migrants heading to Poland, prompting Warsaw authorities to erect a 200-kilometer border fence equipped with cameras and motion sensors. A border guard representative explained... Polish border guard, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, told The Telegraph: "Physical and electronic security measures at the border, such as thermal imaging cameras and detection systems, allow us to respond immediately to any attempt to breach the state border, even if it is underground." Katarzyna Zdanowicz.