POLAND is the EU’s barrier against migrant flows from all points eastern and southern.

Flashback to the 2021 migration crisis on the EU border with Belarus; then the European Commission strong-armed airlines and Middle Eastern states to stop flights to the Belarusian capital.

The so-called Eastern Borders Route into the EU — the term is that used by the EU’s Frontex agency charged with enforcing migration controls — now runs through Moscow. Migrants fly to Moscow and traverse Russia to cross into the former Soviet Baltic republics and Poland, via Belarus.

The Polish border force reports that up to 200 attempts to enter the country are recorded each day. The EU-financed border is marked by a tall steel barrier topped by barbed wire. It takes money, contacts, energy and agility to get through and enter the EU labour markets.

The Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) details beatings, kickings, forced strip searches, threats with firearms, arbitrary detention and forced removals inflicted on thousands of migrants.

Now new tensions are rising in the region. While the Daily Express reports that Belarusian President Lukashenko is forcing Wagner mercenaries to go back to Russia, other reports detail the movement of the several thousand extra Polish border guards supposedly because Wagner mercenaries are gathering at the border.

The notoriously alarmist Lithuanian authorities say they are considering closing their border with Belarus because a group of Wagner mercenaries — reportedly 100 strong — might pretend, according to a Lithuanian junior minister, to be refugees “in order to cause some kind of unrest.”

This is dangerous stuff. While the different accounts are contradictory, they all serve to ramp up tension.

The governments of Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania have called on the EU to extend their ban on imports of Ukrainian grain.

“We will not open this border. If the European Commission does not extend the ban, we’ll do it ourselves,” said Poland’s prime minister while a Zelensky aide said of Ukraine’s critics: “Consciously or unknowingly, they become a ‘tool’ of the Russian aggressor. They choose the side of evil.”

In April, Polish President Andrzej Duda promised that Poland would help Ukraine fight Russia’s invasion, but he also told Zelensky that their relationship was complicated.

“There are still open wounds in the memory of many people,” Duda said, referencing the massacre of 100,000 Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during the second world war.

Poland characterises the killings as genocide but today’s inheritors of the wartime Nazi collaborationist regime ­ — very strong in western Ukraine and entrenched in the Ukrainian military and security apparatus — celebrate both the killings of Poles and of the 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews who used to populate this region, while in Poland there are right-wing forces that want to recover lands lost to post-war Soviet Ukraine.

Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Lukasz Jasina said that Poland has requested a formal apology from Ukraine for the massacres but Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland called the demand “unacceptable and unfortunate.”

Tensions in these regions are complicated and are at variance with Nato’s official myths of fraternity and solidarity.

It is past time for a strong push to effect a ceasefire and start negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.

The enormous political and economic problems that hold back the region’s development cannot be tackled while the war continues.

The working class in each of these countries — and in Britain — has no interest in this war continuing. TUC meetings this year in Liverpool have a real opportunity to take a lead in calling for an end to arms supplies and for Britain to work towards a ceasefire and a resumption of negotiations.