WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland has imposed sanctions on a further 365 Belarusian citizens over the imprisonment of a journalist of Polish origin in Belarus, the interior ministry said on Monday, amid rising tensions between Warsaw and Minsk.
Poland has been an important refuge for opponents of authoritarian Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, and Warsaw has also become one of the staunchest supporters of Ukraine since Minsk’s main ally Russia invaded that country last year.
On Friday a Belarusian court upheld an earlier decision to sentence journalist Andrzej Poczobut to eight years in prison.
Poczobut was jailed on charges of encouraging actions aimed at harming the national security of Belarus, trying to rehabilitate Nazism and inciting ethnic hostility, Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza reported in February. Poland says the charges against him are unjust and politically motivated.
“In connection with the upholding of the draconian verdict in the case of Andrzej Poczobut and the repression by the Belarusian authorities of (Lukashenko’s) political opponents, the minister of interior…decided to enter 365 Belarusian citizens into the list of foreigners whose stay on Polish territory is undesirable,” the ministry said in a statement.
The people are banned from entering the European Union’s passport-free Schengen zone and will have any funds held in Poland frozen, it said.
Those on the list include members of parliament, judges, prosecutors and law enforcement officers as well as people who work in state media, the ministry added.
Twenty entities and 16 people associated mainly with Russian capital will also have any financial holdings frozen.
The Belarusian foreign ministry in Minsk could not immediately be reached for comment.
On Friday, after the Poczobut verdict, a draft regulation appeared on a Polish government website that would close Poland’s eastern border to freight vehicles registered in Belarus and Russia until further notice.
Poland accuses Belarus of artificially creating a migrant crisis on the border by flying in people from the Middle East and Africa and attempting to push them across the frontier. Minsk has denied the accusation.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish; editing by Mark Heinrich)