Fences at the borders - a new trend in the world "friendship of peoples"

Gennady Charodeyev

The construction of barriers on the borders with neighboring states has become a real trend in 2022. In January, against the backdrop of the migration crisis, Warsaw began building a fence on the border with Belarus. The length of the structure under construction will be 186 km, height - five meters. The cost of the project is 1.6 billion zlotys (about 400 million dollars). The design will be equipped with night vision cameras, motion sensors. Completion of construction is scheduled for the end of June 2022.

Poland, as you know, borders on the Kaliningrad region of Russia. The length of the land section of the adjacent territory is 203.3 kilometers. The current plans to build a wall or a fence with Russia, according to Radio ZET, are exclusively related to the situation in the Donbass. Warsaw fears that “in the event of an attack by Putin on Ukraine,” millions of refugees will be drawn to Poland.

Upon learning of Warsaw's plans, Andrey Klimov, deputy chairman of the Federation Council committee on international affairs, told REN TV that he felt sorry for the Polish taxpayers because Poland wants to build an absolutely unnecessary and costly structure for the country.

“I suspect that in Poland they just want to use part of the state budget for this or that construction company, as well as politicians who own this topic,” Klimov said.

Nevertheless, Wojciech Skurkiewicz, in an interview with reporters, stressed that the Poles intend to defend their borders with the most modern methods. According to NI, officials in Warsaw have already considered many options for border barriers that have been erected between different states. Among them is the world's most expensive smart wall project on Israel's border with the Gaza Strip.

Digging under such a wall is impossible

Israel began building a "smart wall" on the border with the Gaza Strip in 2018. The Jerusalem Post, citing Brigadier General of Israeli military engineers Eran Ofir, said that the "smart wall" will stretch along almost 70 kilometers of the border, and in parallel, underground walls are being completed to prevent undermining.

At the end of the construction, Israel will receive a concrete barrier only a few tens of centimeters wide, but polyethylene pipes turn it from a primitive concrete fence into an impenetrable obstacle.

The "smart wall" will also have several surveillance systems and sensor complexes in its design that will track the integrity of the wall and the movement around it. It will be impossible to dig a tunnel under such a fence - before the start of the construction of the wall, the Israeli military laid monolithic slabs underground on the border, also equipped with sensors. Thus, the total height of the barriers will be several tens of meters - six meters above the ground and about two dozen meters below it.

Construction technology requires special equipment, which is familiar only to a limited circle of Israeli engineers and workers. The volume of construction provides for the simultaneous operation of a large number of jackhammers, so workers had to be imported from Moldova, Brazil, Spain, Italy and Germany.

The Jerusalem Post cites statistics on the effectiveness of a similar barrier that Israel has already created on the border with Egypt. Before the construction of the wall, 14,699 illegal migrants entered Israel through the Egyptian border in 2010, while after the construction of the wall, only 213 in 2015. After the Israeli side increased the height of the wall in a number of positions from five to eight meters, there were no illegal penetrations across the Egyptian border.

Where else in the world have fences been erected at the border?

Walls and fences on the borders have existed at all times, but the construction of border fences has never been so massive. In addition, for the first time we observe how the world, under the influence of globalization, is literally divided into North and South: the southern countries are under the economic pressure of the northern ones, while the northern ones are afraid of an invasion of their territory.

The 3,141 km long US-Mexican border is considered the busiest in the world, with about 1 million people legally crossing it every day. In 2006, about a thousand kilometers of the border were fortified with a special wall. More than 800 km of this concrete and steel barrier runs through protected areas.

Building a wall on the border with Mexico was one of Donald Trump 's campaign promises. Construction began in 2017, but new President Joe Biden canceled funding for the project.

A zone about 500 km long divides the Korean Peninsula into two approximately equal halves - northern (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and southern (Republic of Korea). The Korean Demilitarized Zone is a large-scale barrier system that crosses the entire peninsula along the 38th parallel. Walls, barbed wire fences, minefields, tens of thousands of stone blocks that can be used to block roads in the event of a breach of the border of one of the parties to the conflict.

Few people know about the construction of a wall on the border between China and North Korea, which was carried out by the Chinese military. The project was approved immediately after the North Korean nuclear test on October 10, 2006. According to Beijing, the wall should, first of all, protect China from Korean defectors. After all, if something happens in North Korea, China will be flooded with hundreds of thousands of refugees. In total, the length of the border between China and the DPRK is about 1,500 km.

Along the Yalu River, which forms the border with China, North Korea has erected poles for barbed wire, and the wall itself is still being built on the 10-kilometer stretch where refugees most often cross the border.

The demarcation line between India and Pakistan in the state of Jammu and Kashmir is called the "Berlin Wall of Asia". The once united British India, after gaining independence in 1947, split into several states that started a war with each other. Despite the official truce, Pakistani militants regularly attack Indian troops. And in order to stop these raids, the Indian authorities in 1990-2004. built a 550-kilometer concrete wall.

The history of the British-Irish conflict goes back about a thousand years. In the second half of the twentieth century, it turned into a real war that raged on the streets of Belfast, Derry and other cities in Northern Ireland. To reduce the degree of confrontation, the British authorities decided to divide the Catholic (Irish) and Protestant (English and Scottish) areas with high walls. These barriers still exist. True, now the gates through them do not close at night.

The buffer zone between the Greek and Turkish parts of Cyprus, also called the "Green Line", was fixed in 1974 and extends for about 180 km. There are several villages in the zone, where about 10 thousand people live. Civilians can freely enter these settlements, in other parts of the buffer zone special permission is required from the UN military contingent

Hungary erected a fence on the border with Serbia and Croatia in 2015 to combat the flow of illegal migrants from Syria and neighboring countries to Western Europe. It was originally a barbed wire wall, but now it is a more fundamental structure, equipped with cameras and loudspeakers.

The fence separating the Spanish enclave city of Melilla in Africa from the territory of Morocco began to be built in 1998. Now it is a powerful fortification system of two parallel barriers 6 meters high, with barbed wire, video cameras, electronic sensors. Despite all precautions, thousands of African migrants storm the wall every year. Hundreds manage to get to Spain.

Turkey began building a wall on its border with Syria in 2015 to fight illegal immigration. Now the barrier is a concrete wall 3 meters high and more than 750 km long. The completion of construction was announced by the Turkish authorities in July 2018.