Overview

• Poland’s Interior Ministry announced that temporary checks at crossings with Germany and Lithuania will continue until 4 April 2026 under Schengen’s exceptional provisions, which require EU notification.
• Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski said the focus is monitoring flows from the Baltic states toward Western Europe to catch smugglers, with border forces prioritizing the Belarus frontier.
• Warsaw introduced the measures in July as a direct response to German controls, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk had linked any rollback to decisions by Berlin.
• Germany has run spot checks at the Polish border since 2023 and intensified them in May, authorizing turnbacks including of some asylum seekers, a policy that a Berlin court has partly deemed unlawful.
• Officials in Poland and the EU accuse Belarus of facilitating migrant movements toward the EU, while domestic militia activity in Poland has subsided and German authorities report thousands of turnbacks.