Friday 18 November 2022 01:26 AM Poland, Finland and Latvia to construct huge barbed wire fences on borders with ... trends now

More than 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell, a new Iron Curtain is descending across Europe.

As Vladimir Putin's bitter assault on Ukraine continues, European countries have begun reinforcing their borders with Russia and its ally Belarus amid fears their territories could be flooded with migrants.

The tactic, which Western officials referred to as 'weaponised migration' and 'hybrid warfare', has been employed by both Russia and Belarus since well before the war in Ukraine began in February.

In 2015 and 2016, Russia ushered thousands of asylum-seekers, mostly from the Middle East, to border checkpoints in northern Finland.

Then in 2021 the EU accused Lukashenko of luring migrants to his country on false promises of passage into Europe, before pushing them to the Polish border and forcing them to make illegal crossings.

Poland in response constructed 115 miles worth of steel walls and barbed wire fences along its border.

But now as tensions between Russia and the West continue to strain and the war in Ukraine approaches the nine month mark, many more European leaders have begun hardening their frontiers.

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin announced plans to fortify parts of her country's 830-mile border - the longest with any EU member - with Russia, claiming the fortifications would help defend the nation against the 'hybrid threat' of possible large-scale and irregular migration orchestrated by the Kremlin.

The Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia will follow suit, while the Poles last month even began erecting barbed wire fences along the length of their border with Kaliningrad - a Russian exclave nestled between Poland and Lithuania.

By 2025, the new barriers will total a whopping 2,106 miles in length. 

But they will offer little protection from missiles or tanks - governments instead expect the walls, fences and electronic surveillance to provide better control of their borders and to stop large migrant surges.