Poland plans to add several hundred Belarusian justice and court officials to its sanctions list in response to recent convictions of opposition figures and representatives of the Polish national minority.
Polish Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Wonsik announced this Monday evening on the Polsat television channel. There are now around 80 people and companies from Russia and Belarus on the list. Wonsik also mentioned other tools, such as border crossings, that could be closed in response to the escalating situation. He said that if that happened, Belarus could lose access to Poland, which for it is an important window to the world.
On Monday, the Minsk City Court sentenced representatives of the Belarusian Opposition Coordination Council to 12 to 18 years in prison for high treason, conspiracy to seize state power and creating a formation extremist.
In the spring of 2021, a journalist from the international channel Polonia, a Belarusian citizen of Polish origin Andrei Pochobut, was arrested, who was included in the list of persons and organizations involved in terrorist activities by the Security Committee of the state of Belarus. In February 2023, the Grodno court found him guilty of public calls to commit acts aimed at undermining the national security of the Republic of Belarus and of disseminating materials containing such calls through the media and the Internet.
