PM Morawiecki: Lukashenko and Putin can do strange things

Speaking by the fence in Krynki, built last year on the border with Belarus to curb the flow of illegal immigrants, Mateusz Morawiecki said Belarusian and Russian leaders - Alexander Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin respectively - could do "strange things" and Poland had seen such strange actions in 2021.

"Things that we and our NATO allies have been conducting various analyses and research on. Yes, we've seen one of such actions of Lukashenko and Putin in 2021 (referring to the migrant crisis on the Poland-Belarus border).

In late 2021 Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was accused by the European Union of orchestrating the influx of migrants to pressure it to back down over sanctions slapped on his government. Nearly 40,000 people from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa tried to illegally breach the border from Belarus.

"The events in Russia from yesterday and the night before show that everything that is happening there is characterised by a high level of unpredictability. We don't know, and no one in the world knows, what were the real reasons behind (the events) that ended late evening yesterday on the way to Moscow, the Wagner Group's march, the march of Prigozhin's soldiers (Wagner Group's commander, Yevgeny Prigozhin) and the upcoming weeks will probably show us," the Polish prime minister said.

Morawiecki also said Poland is much safer as a member of the NATO alliance.

"I stress that we are much safer because there's never enough of investing in the military forces. You either have (the equipment) to defend yourself and then you don't have to defend or you have nothing to defend yourself and you have to defend, sometimes in dramatic circumstances what we've seen many times in our history," he added.

Wagner mercenaries fighting in Ukraine who crossed into Russia on Saturday halted their advance on Moscow, withdrew from the southern Russian city of Rostov and headed back to their bases in the evening under an amnesty granting them safety.

Their commander, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had demanded that Russia's defence minister and the army's top general be handed over to him, would move to Belarus under the deal mediated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Prigozhin, who has accused both men of gross incompetence and corruption, said he wanted to "restore justice".

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday issued via the Kremlin website his first statement since the mutiny by the Wagner mercenary group.

It was not immediately clear when or where Putin's statement was recorded.

Putin made a national address to the Russian people on Saturday condemning the mutiny by Wagner mercenaries as a "stab in the back" and vowing to crush it.

He has not commented publicly on the subsequent deal, announced late on Saturday, that appeard to defuse the crisis and avert possible bloodshed by allowing the Wagner fighters to return to base and their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to move to Belarus.