A new investigation borrows the methods of forensic architecture to argue that deaths in the Polish-Belarusian borderlands since 2021 cannot be blamed on the cold alone. Poland’s Interior Ministry says the report distorts the picture.
In the winter of 2021, Katarzyna Czarnota called an ambulance for three boys, aged 16 or 17, who had spent days in the primeval forest of Bialowieza, eating leaves and drinking from a puddle. The dispatcher refused to come. “These are illegal migrants,” she remembers being told. “I’m not sending an ambulance.”
When migrants die on the Polish-Belarusian border, the official record tends to stop at the physiological cause of death: hypothermia, drowning, cardiac arrest. But these terms, in everyday language, make the river or the cold the culprit, “rather than the person who left someone there”, Czarnota, who led research on that border for the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights from 2021 to 2024, tells BIRN.
“Hypothermia describes how a person died. It does not explain why they were exposed to lethal conditions in the first place,” she says.
The Death Zone – The Making of a Lethal Pushback Regime Across the Polish–Belarusian Borderlands, a report published on September 8 by the investigative agency Border Forensics and two research projects, Circumference of Violence and Infrastructuring Nature, sets out to answer that question.
Czarnota was one of its lead researchers. Drawing on testimonies, medical data, field research, maps and geostatistical analysis, the researchers examined 102 documented deaths linked to the Polish-Belarusian border area and 214 fragmentary reports of potential disappearances. Their central allegation is stark: that policies, infrastructure and law-enforcement practices on both sides of the border “knowingly exposed” migrants to environmental conditions that had already proved lethal.
The accumulation of harm
The method comes from forensic architecture, a field developed at Goldsmiths, University of London, where the architect Eyal Weizman in 2010 pioneered using satellite imagery, 3D models, and the reconstruction of spaces and events to investigate state violence. Charles Heller, The Death Zone report’s director of research, was among Forensic Architecture’s first researchers. After a decade applying its methods in the Mediterranean, in 2021 he co-founded Border Forensics to take them to other borderlands.
What space adds to research is a way of seeing how separate harms accumulate. “Migrants crossing the borderlands experience multiple combined forms of violence as they remain stuck, trapped there for weeks or months, in cycles of push-forwards and pushbacks,” Heller tells BIRN.
The report traces how violence by law enforcement on the Polish-Belarusian border is compounded by harm inflicted through the border infrastructure and, finally, by what the authors call environmentally mediated harm. The way it often works, Heller explains, is that people are beaten by Belarusian officers, sometimes by smugglers, and then again by Polish officers who intercept them and push them back. Those who try to climb the 5.5-metre fence get cut, and break ankles and arms when they fall. Often unable to get across, they stay in the borderlands for longer, retreating deeper into the dense Bialowieza Forest to avoid capture. That, in turn, exposes them to the swamps, rivers and winter temperatures that fall well below zero.
“The 102 deaths we focus on are primarily the outcome of forms of environmentally mediated harm,” Heller says. The environment though, he argues, is made harmful and lethal not as the result of any natural condition, “but because it is turned into a territory of violence through legislation, through law enforcement practices, through border infrastructures.”
To prove this, the researchers modelled, among other things, how cold exposure builds up the longer people are stranded, and mapped it against the locations of distress calls. But a map alone cannot say why people died where they did. “Old school techniques of research, such as interviews, testimonies or statistics, are absolutely essential,” Heller says. “The power of spatial and visual methods really emerges from their combination with these approaches.”
The geostatistical analysis was used to test patterns first identified through interviews and testimonies gathered by the Polish group We Are Monitoring and reconstructions of ten fatal incidents.
Czarnota calls this a counter-investigation. “If someone drowned, say, we look at how they ended up in the water – including whether there had been a pushback, and whether their death was connected to actions or omissions by state actors, such as the Border Guard, police or military,” she says.
When a body is found in Poland, prosecutors automatically open an investigation, but cases from the border tend to end there. The first inquiry into deaths near the Belarusian border covered bodies found from autumn 2021 to the end of 2022. Prosecutors in Suwalki examined 12 deaths in it, closed 11, Radio Bialystok reported in March 2024. The reason, Czarnota says, is that they are examined as possible involuntary manslaughter.
“This framework looks for a direct act and a direct perpetrator, while much of the violence at the border operates indirectly,” she says. “Harm can be spatially and temporally separated from the actions that produced it – for example, when someone is pushed back or left in a swamp, prevented from calling for help, or when access to assistance is effectively blocked.”
The researchers’ task was to reconstruct the chain of actions, omissions and conditions that preceded each death, rather than to treat the place where a body was found as the starting point of the investigation.
Dispersing responsibility
The report turns on the word “knowingly”, and Czarnota is careful about its limits. “We are not saying that the Polish state deliberately created a system intended to cause deaths,” she said. “But once the first deaths and disappearances began to occur in 2021 and 2022, the consequences of this policy were already known. And yet the policy did not change; if anything, it became harsher.”
Donald Tusk campaigned in 2023 on ending rights violations at the border. In office, however, his government left in place the rules, introduced by its predecessor in 2021, that allow the Border Guard to return people to the border line. When it began speaking of “humanitarian pushbacks”, Czarnota says, “it became clear to us that the practice wasn’t changing – only the narrative around state responsibility.”
In March 2025, the government temporarily suspended the right to claim asylum for people crossing from Belarus, with exceptions for vulnerable groups. Legal measures, policy changes and infrastructure, she says, have created “a kind of hidden zone of violence, where people are effectively deprived of legal protection.”
Belarus opened the migrant route in 2021ent a border crisis in retaliation for EU sanctions. The report’s authors are “highly critical” of Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime, but argue that it could exploit migrants only because of conditions Poland and the EU had created. “Poland and the EU have fallen into a trap of their own making, which Belarus has activated,” Heller says
The report’s recommendations follow from that diagnosis. The authors argue that a lasting end to the violence – and to the exploitation of migration by states such as Belarus – would require a fundamental shift in Polish and EU policy, including an end to what they call the framing of migrants as a threat, and the creation of safe and legal routes into Europe. The first step would be to heed the victims and their families, who have repeatedly demanded accountability. “We have become obsessed with understanding migration through the language of controlling migrants, rather than controlling how the system itself operates towards them,” Czarnota says.
The trouble is that pushbacks can leave little in the way of a paper trail. In December 2023, Poland’s Ombudsman noted that under the procedure used to return people to the border, the Border Guard does not record their personal data, age, health condition or disability. Unlike another return procedure regulated by the Aliens Act, information about those subjected to these pushbacks does not appear in Border Guard documentation.
Meaningful accountability, Czarnota argues, would mean examining the whole chain of events behind each death or disappearance, and the part played in it by individual officers, rather than treating every case as an isolated medical event.
Meanwhile, for long stretches since 2021, human rights monitors and rescue teams have been barred from the border area or allowed only limited access – first under a state of emergency, later within a buffer zone introduced in 2024 – and people who help migrants have faced criminal charges.
“We do not write this report with any illusions,” Heller says. Their recommendations run against the direction of Polish and European politics, and the authors know it. The hope, he adds, is that it “can constitute a wake-up call”.
Poland’s Interior Ministry has rejected the report’s findings. “Responsibility for the situation of foreigners attempting to cross the Polish-Belarusian border illegally lies with the authorities of Russia and Belarus who created it, and with the smuggling networks linked to them,” the ministry tells BIRN in a statement, adding that the report “distorts the picture” and ignores the “hybrid attack” waged by Minsk in cooperation with Moscow.
The ministry cites nearly 3 billion zloty (686 million euros) spent on barriers and the Border Guard, and says there had been 472 attempts to cross the border illegally between January 1 and September 13 this year, compared with 25,519 in the same period of 2025 – a fall of 98 per cent.
It argues that migrants had received medical and humanitarian aid throughout the crisis, and that the report’s authors had not cited available Border Guard rescue data.
The ministry did not answer BIRN’s question about whether it holds aggregate data on deaths and disappearances at the border. Poland publishes no official count of them; the most complete records have been compiled by civil society groups.
“This system is designed to protect state actors against accountability,” Czarnota says. “Responsibility is dispersed: nature is blamed, the environment is blamed, and migrants themselves are blamed for having put themselves in danger by attempting to cross the border.”
In this reading, the landscape hides the chain of responsibility as effectively as it hides the people crossing it.
The report ends with Mahlet Kassa, who died in the forest in February 2023 after, the authors say, Polish border guards failed to help her. For her uncle, Seyoume Shashego, the case remains open. The family knows why she died, he says, “and yet no one does anything about it.”
Source: balkaninsight.com
