The bison was killed on the edge of the ancient forest. The villagers found it in the morning, a half-ton of muscle and bone knocked out on the tarmac. Bison are a common enough sight on these roads in winter, and locals drive carefully to avoid such collisions. The dead animal in this case had been struck by a large, speeding vehicle. A younger animal stood over the carcass, prodding its fallen companion with its nose.
In the Polish village of Bialowieza, the main settlement in the forest of the same name, bison have been known to forage near homes, though they tend to keep well away from people. But the fallen bison’s companion stayed put, nuzzling against the body as a crowd gathered. “There was clearly a bond between the animals,” said Rafal Kowalczyk, a Bialowieza-based scientist. “They must have spent some time together, feeding, resting, giving each other a sense of security.” The oxlike creature’s violent death illustrates the strain facing this ancient ecosystem: It has become a stage for 21st-century conflicts. A military vehicle was soon identified as being responsible for the crash.
Poles across the political divide do not agree on very much these days, but pretty much everyone sees Bialowieza as a national treasure. The forest is to Poland what the Grand Canyon is to the United States. Schoolchildren learn of it as a mythical wilderness from the dawn of the nation, a survivor of kingdoms, partition, world wars and communism. Most of the forest, an area spanning the size of greater London, has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its depths have an otherworldly quality. Centuries-old trees loom over impassable undergrowth. Tourists stick to a thin web of trails, maps downloaded to their phones. The phone signal is patchy. The Polish networks drop away, and occasionally the Belarusian ones pick you up. When the wind blows, the shifting branches let out sudden shrieks and groans — disconcertingly human sounds in a landscape unmarked by human activity.
While all of Poland may want the forest preserved, the ancient ecosystem is under pressure like never before. An extraordinary combination of external forces is now bearing down upon Bialowieza. It has entered the age of polycrisis. The forest is at the intersection of seemingly disparate crises — political, economic, geopolitical and ecological — that are feeding off each other and making the underlying problems worse. Over the last three years, it has become a staging post for thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in search of a better life in Europe. It is also host to the military garrison tasked with stopping these people. Meanwhile, its scientists are battling a predatory timber industry, and its iconic animals contend with a shrinking habitat.
The British historian Adam Tooze popularized the “polycrisis” concept to describe the runaway train of disruption unleashed by events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, turbulence in the financial markets and extreme weather linked to climate change. In the polycrisis, he says, the whole becomes more overwhelming than the sum of its parts, distorting one’s sense of reality.
The forest, which straddles the border between Poland and Belarus, is one of Europe’s largest primeval woodlands, predating both countries — and the very concept of the nation-state — by many thousands of years. It is the remnant of a vast woodland that once covered the Great European Plain, the topographical term for the lowland region that begins at the Bay of Biscay to the west of France and flares eastward, broadening into the steppes and ending with the Urals in Russia. This enormous, continent-wide forest dated back to the end of the Ice Age. Over thousands of years, it was cleared to make way for pastures, fields and settlements. From the medieval era onward, a succession of monarchs — Lithuanian, Polish and Russian — used Bialowieza as a hunting ground and took measures to preserve it as such.
For scientists and conservationists today, the forest has been a living laboratory, a window into a vanished world. Its trees and plants have thrived and decayed in the same spot over millennia, supporting a unique ecosystem of rare insects and fungi as well as owls, wolves, lynx and hundreds of European bison, the continent’s heaviest wild land animal. However, shifts in the ecosystem, linked to climate change, have spawned new opportunities for a timber industry that has always viewed the forest as a potential resource. The tension between nature conservation and commercial exploitation is neither new nor unique to Bialowieza. It is the recent addition of geopolitics to the mix that has plunged the forest into polycrisis.
The bison was one of four to have been killed in collisions with the military in the winter of 2023. Bialowieza’s most famous inhabitants, the creatures are famously portrayed on bottles of Zubrowka vodka, made from the grass the animals chew, and are a national symbol of sorts, sitting somewhere above the white stork and below the crested white eagle in the Polish patriot’s bestiary. Poland’s armed forces are also an emblem of national pride. The men in uniform represent the country’s tradition of resistance against occupation, an image that has been burnished since Russia managed to occupy large swaths of Ukraine. The deaths of the iconic bison prompted shock in the media and calls for soldiers to take greater care in the forest. However, no one questioned what these men were doing there.
Over the last three years, thousands of migrants and refugees have been trying to enter the European Union, or EU, via the Polish border within the forest. The EU accuses the pro-Russian regime in Minsk of “weaponizing” migration flows. It has responded by fortifying and militarizing the border. The forest is now another front line in the migration crisis — a site of monumental barriers, litter-strewn encampments, high-tech surveillance and deadly violence. This fragile ecosystem now hosts thousands of soldiers and similar numbers of migrants and refugees, engaged in games of cat and mouse and occasional running battles. Videos shared by the Border Guard have shown migrants pelting troops and military vehicles with sticks and stones. Polish forces have been known to respond with tear gas and water cannons, and by firing into the air.
None of the EU’s heavily policed borders can match the extraordinary environmental value of Bialowieza. More than 100 species of mushrooms and insects, all new to science, have been discovered in the forest over the last century. Bogdan Jaroszewicz, the former Head of the Bialowieza Geobotanical Station, said the scale of the discoveries was striking, given how intensively European wildlife has been surveyed. “The fact that we’re finding species previously unknown to science shows that they are either unique to the forest, or extremely rare,” he said.
The centerpiece of Poland’s response to the migration crisis is a 115-mile barrier of 18-foot-high metal panels, topped with concertina wire, cameras and motion detectors. Work on the barrier started in 2021; it was up and running a year later. The project brought heavy machinery into woods that had not been disturbed for centuries, killing small animals, including endangered varieties of lizard and beetle. The barrier also interrupts routes used by larger animals, such as the lynx.
Building the barrier and maintaining it alongside a military garrison have so far cost the Polish state nearly 1 billion euros. Polish authorities have consistently dodged journalists’ questions about the barrier’s environmental impact, citing emergency provisions. The barrier was built without conducting an assessment required by the EU’s Habitats Directive, a set of laws that forms the cornerstone of the bloc’s nature conservation strategy. “This was definitely a massive violation,” said Magdalena Bar, an environmental lawyer. “There isn’t even an appearance of compliance, nothing, not a single step from the Habitats Directive was fulfilled.” Nonetheless, she said, it was unlikely that the EU would prosecute Poland over the breach.
The assessment is meant to determine whether a proposed construction will have a negative impact on a protected site and to set out measures to mitigate the harm. For the time being, the only evidence of harm mitigation is a series of gates built into the barrier, supposedly to allow for animal crossings. They remain shut, and in Bialowieza village, the locals question how they will operate. A joke was doing the rounds when I last visited: “Are the bison going to go over and ask the guards to open the gate?” So far, people can only think of one use for the gates — to help Polish border guards conduct pushbacks.
The residents of Bialowieza have traditionally worked in forestry or as border guards. Over the past few decades, tourism has flourished. The region’s transitory population includes scientists conducting research in the forest and a small bohemian scene — of writers, painters, musicians and activists. Most of the residents have little direct contact with the migrants and refugees. “We’re scared of them and they’re scared of us,” my landlady told me. Many worry that the migration crisis — and the Polish government’s response to it — will drive away the tourists. Some question the effectiveness of the military measures. Jaroslav, a local shop owner who preferred not to share his last name due to the sensitivity of the topic, said he had seen YouTube videos of migrants easily sawing through the metal barrier. “For 2 billion zloty ($490 million), we could’ve built kindergartens or hospitals. We’re the savages here, not them, because we fence ourselves in.”
No one should be surprised that the EU is willing to sacrifice nature conservation for border security. The EU’s response to the migration crisis, characterized by pushbacks and pacts with repressive governments, ignores its obligations under international humanitarian law. In Bialowieza, experts say, environmental obligations are similarly cast aside. “When the army appears on the scene, nature is subordinated to military goals,” said Daniel Bockowski, a historian specializing in security issues at the University of Bialystok, the capital of the region.
Illustration by Sanja Pantic/BIRN
On a sweltering August afternoon last year, I joined a couple of activists who had received a call for help from a group of migrants and refugees that had just crossed the border. As well as food and water, the activists were bringing medicine for a member of the group, a Syrian woman who was said to be suffering from diabetes. The group had shared its coordinates, but then the contact stopped. The activists focused on an area near the border fence, searching for hours, examining trails in the vegetation for clues. The forest floor was covered in pine needles and swarming with large ants that constantly attacked my legs. I found a traditional Arab scarf, a chequered red keffiyeh, hanging on a branch. It had not been there long — it still smelled of the owner’s perfume. However, there was no sign of the missing group. The activists concluded that it had most likely been pushed back by a border patrol. Polish forces have been brutalizing the migrants and refugees, according to testimony collected by activists. Survivors of the crossing whom I interviewed would complain of beatings, pepper spray and having their shoes and coats removed during winter. A spokesperson for the Polish border guards told me by email that the force works “within the legal framework” to protect the “security and inviolability” of the frontier.
The terrain presents an additional hazard for anyone hoping to make it across. Everything that makes the forest environmentally unique also makes it exhausting to traverse. Navigating piles of toppled, decaying trees requires a degree of athleticism. More than a third of the forest is swamp and wetland, which forces long detours. Migrants and refugees have been found suffering from trench foot, a fungal infection of the skin that develops after they walk in soaked footwear for days on end. Others are never found, wandering around until they run out of food and water. At least 40 people have died in the Polish part of the forest since 2021, according to activists from the We Are Monitoring organization. However, the true figure is likely to be much higher, given that about 235 people are still reported missing by relatives.
The forest hides their remains. “We may find them years later, or perhaps never, as animals drag the skeletons around, or the unburied bones disintegrate under atmospheric conditions,” said Rafal Kowalczyk, who is a professor at the Mammal Research Institute, a pioneering academic body established in the 1950s to study the forest’s fauna. The forest has at least 40 animal species that eat carrion, he said. His wife, Eliza Kowalczyk, is a nature photographer who doubles up as an activist with the Podlasie Volunteer Emergency Service, a local nongovernmental organization that helps migrants and refugees who get into trouble in the forest. “When I see a flock of ravens circling above the forest, I immediately think they could be feeding on a human body,” she said. “My view of the forest has changed completely.”
The autocratic leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, is believed to have orchestrated the crisis at the border in retaliation for EU sanctions imposed over his crackdown on nationwide pro-democracy protests in 2020. The migrants and refugees come from the Middle East, North Africa and Central and South Asia. Many arrive in Minsk by air, traveling from hubs such as Moscow and Istanbul. Some set up camp in the forest, others are hurried across by Belarusian security forces with threats and assaults. “The Belarusian territory of the forest is well-suited to illegal migration sanctioned by the presidential administration,” said Inessa Bolotina, an independent ecologist and activist based in the country. “There are very few local people there who can come into contact with the migrants, take pictures, and pass on the information to the independent media.”
No one on the political spectrum in Poland questions the conservation value of Bialowieza. The right sometimes emphasizes its status as heritage. The conservative tabloid Gazeta Polska has described the forest in quasi-mystical terms, referring to it in 2018 as “where the story of Polish nature begins.” Liberals and the left also make appeals to national pride. For Adam Wajrak, a prominent journalist who writes books about the forest for children and adults, nature conservation is “modern patriotism.”
However, mainstream Polish news coverage of the border crisis does not dwell on the environmental impact or heritage value. Bialowieza is portrayed overwhelmingly as a place where Poland protects itself, less as a place itself worthy of protection. Surveys suggest a majority of Poles back the military buildup on the Belarusian border. Many accept the official narrative, that the migrants are being deployed as an instrument of hybrid warfare to destabilize Poland and the EU. The attitude is summed up by a slogan circulating online, also spotted on posters and T-shirts in the border region. “Murem za mundurem,” it says, meaning, “Firmly behind the uniform.” On a visit last year, I saw a Polish tourist thanking a passing group of officers for their service. Such spontaneous displays of patriotism, common enough in the U.S., were until recently a rare sight in Poland.
The Polish authorities have sought to capitalize on these sentiments. Last year, Wagner mercenaries were said to have relocated to Belarus following their failed coup attempt in Russia. The news reports prompted speculation that they might launch an incursion into Poland. In response, the government of the time beefed up the garrison at the border, showing off the military’s latest armored personnel carriers. Most analysts concluded that the Wagner threat had been overstated and that the Polish response had been stage-managed with an eye on approaching elections.
The ancestors of the bison of Bialowieza once ranged across Europe. Encounters between the animals and Stone Age hunters are depicted in some of the continent’s oldest surviving artworks, the Lascaux cave paintings in southern France. The European bison was eventually hunted to extinction. The last of the animals in the wild was shot dead a hundred years ago. In the Polish patriotic imagination, the bison of Bialowieza represent an unbroken link to a mythic past. In fact, the animals are the descendants of a captive-breeding program: The species was reintroduced to the forest in the 1950s.
Bialowieza had other problems before it became a front line in Europe’s migration crisis. The forest has a natural predator: the timber industry. Almost all of the forest in Belarus, and some of it in Poland, falls within national parks. While the trees within the national parks are protected from exploitation, there are fewer restrictions in the remaining parts of the forest. Poland and Belarus determine the quotas for logging in this area, balancing commercial incentives against obligations to protect the environment.
Climate change can tip the scales in favor of logging. Poland’s previous government was led by Law and Justice, or PiS in Polish, the conservative nationalist party that reshaped the state and the judiciary in its own image, blending nativist ideology with autocratic tactics. In March 2016, the party gave the green light to large-scale logging operations in the zone of the forest that lies in a gray area — outside the strict protections of a national park but within the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s no-logging zone. The move led to a prolonged showdown with environmental activists who had set up a protest camp in the forest. The logging operation was eventually called off after a ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union in April 2018. The government had initially justified logging as a necessary measure to control the spread of the spruce bark beetle, a parasite. The invasion of the beetle has been traced to long spells of drought, linked to a warming climate, that had weakened the spruce trees.
Similar ripple effects are taking place across the ecosystem. Long-term shifts in rainfall can weaken certain species and make space for others. The timber industry stands to benefit from the instability. Scientists have clashed with forestry officials over the best response to the threat from climate change. According to Jaroszewicz, officials under the previous government favored a “catastrophic” approach that envisaged the extensive replanting of threatened plant species deemed native to the forest. The scientists argued for a less interventionist approach, allowing the forest to adapt to the changing climate. “The changes that take place in today’s climate happen so fast that we, as scientists, believe it’s best to allow the forest to adjust to them on its own,” Jaroszewicz explains. “This way, perhaps all spruces might disappear but something new will take their place.”
For now, the timber industry is being kept at arm’s length. Late last year, the Law and Justice-led government was voted out of office and succeeded by a coalition led by the center-right Civic Platform. The new government promised to take conservation seriously. It replaced senior personnel at the national park and the state forestry agency, attempting to correct a perceived institutional bias toward commercial exploitation over nature conservation.
On border security, however, the new government has followed the course charted by its predecessor, with the EU’s backing. Incoming officials argued that the existing fortifications were easily breached and needed to be strengthened. Donald Tusk, the prime minister and darling of EU liberals, initially promised to overhaul the barrier after he was elected. The barrier inherited from the previous government was, he said, barely functional — it existed only in name.
The military garrison in the forest remains in place, with indications that migrants and refugees are still massing on the Belarusian side. Rights groups say Polish border guards are still carrying out pushbacks. In May this year, a Polish soldier was killed in a knife attack by a migrant at the border. In response, the government enforced a “buffer zone” around the frontier that it claims has “significantly ” reduced the number of illegal crossings. Access to the zone is now limited to registered inhabitants and permit holders.
The Polish right says activists who come to the aid of migrants and refugees are collaborating with human traffickers, echoing charges leveled against NGOs in Italy and Greece. For their part, the activists say they are in the forest to uphold the basic humanitarian principles abandoned by their governments and the EU. Many of the activists in Bialowieza were also involved in the environmental movement and took part in the protests against logging in 2017. They are drawn from the same group of people, said the nature photographer and migrant rights activist Eliza Kowalczyk. “It’s a matter of worldview.”
In February 2023, Eliza and a fellow activist accompanied her scientist husband, Rafal, to a restricted zone within the national park. This area hosts some of the forest’s oldest trees and rarest animal species. Casual visitors cannot enter the zone unless escorted by an official guide. As a scientist, however, Rafal had a permit that allowed him to bring two guests. The group was searching for an Afghan man who was reportedly stranded in the forest, suffering a health emergency. It had notified the police of the search, in line with protocol, but it was intercepted by park rangers and forced to turn back. When the group returned to the forest a month later, they found the Afghan man’s body. The park authorities went on to tighten the rules for the scientists who held permits for the zone: Guests were no longer allowed to accompany them without being vetted.
Soldiers, however, had been known to flout the rules for entering the restricted zone. The troops deployed in 2021 were often spotted jogging or cycling in the area. The park authorities indicated that these violations stopped in 2022, and none were reported in the following year. Spokesperson Emilia Wojciechowska said park employees had also “conducted trainings” for the troops, laying out general rules of conduct, including guidelines for drivers.
Not all soldiers seem to have gotten the message. I often found litter in areas frequented by the military. Discarded cigarette packs, cans of energy drinks and takeout food packaging lay strewn around the border fence where the troops were concentrated. The migrants and refugees also leave their litter behind, but it is more likely to consist of survival essentials such as rations or items of clothing, clearly sourced from Belarus or further afield. Visitors to the forest are under strict orders to remove their litter. Abandoned bottles of fizzy drinks become death traps for beetles. Food waste trains scavengers to associate humans with easy pickings. When large animals such as wolves and bison start approaching people, they are likely to be designated a threat and shot. Visitors to the national park are also expected to leave the environment undisturbed — they can technically be penalized for picking a flower. However, I was told by local residents and scientists last winter that the troops had been collecting branches for use as firewood, a major breach of the regulations, as dead trees are integral to the Bialowieza ecosystem.
I asked the army division stationed at the border, WZZ Podlasie, to comment on the soldiers’ conduct. Its spokesperson, Szymon Glazowski, told me the soldiers received “daily instructions” to ensure they complied with environmental regulations and had minimal impact on the ecosystem. The military had also been clearing up its trash, he said. He did not answer allegations that the army had been sourcing wood from protected areas, stating only that the firewood was supplied by a logistics unit.
Last December, I visited the village of Opoka Duza, next to the border with Belarus. The new barrier runs along the main road here. Patrol cars went up and down the route, and there was a military outpost — a shedlike structure — after every thousand yards or so. Soldiers stood outside the outposts, burning wood in braziers to keep warm. The number of illegal crossings tends to fall dramatically in the winter months because of the risk of hypothermia. The border villages were nonetheless teeming with soldiers, some in full uniform, others in civilian clothes but identifiable by their military-style backpacks.
The barrier had been toughened up since my previous visit that summer. There was now an additional 6-foot-high fence of concertina wire, running parallel to the main fence. “People come here by sea, they face all kinds of dangers like sharks, rough seas, the risk of drowning — I don’t think barbed wire will stop them,” an Iraqi asylum-seeker told me via WhatsApp message from a camp in Gomel, Belarus. We had stayed in touch after I found him walking along the road in the forest. He had fled Iraq, he told me, after being imprisoned for being gay. Soon after we met, he was pushed back by Polish guards, apparently for the fourth time. It is notoriously difficult to get an accurate sense of the number of migrants and refugees seeking to enter the EU illegally. Pushbacks tend to go unrecorded; the same is true of successful crossings. Activists believe the overall numbers have been relatively stable, but there has been a shift in the composition: There are fewer children and elderly crossing the forest frontier now, and young men predominate.
While the barrier’s impact on clandestine migration patterns is open to dispute, its impact on the pristine forest environment ought to be clearer. During the construction, trees and undergrowth were damaged as large trucks carried materials to the frontier. Countless reptiles, amphibians, small mammals, insects and birds were killed, mostly from common species, according to research by the Bialowieza Geobotanical Station of the University of Warsaw. Katarzyna Nowak, the scientist who conducted the study, highlighted the loss of members of an endangered species — the purple-blue beetle, Carabus intricatus.
Bison are less affected by the new barrier because the populations on either side of the border were already kept apart by the barbed-wire fence constructed during Soviet times. These older fortifications were, however, rudimentary enough to allow for the passage of bears, wolves and lynx. The new barrier is expected to disrupt the migration patterns and hunting habits of these animals too.
Bialowieza is part of the EU’s Natura 2000 network of conservation areas, which means it is protected not just by Polish legislation but also by the EU Habitats Directive, the laws that undergird the bloc’s approach to nature conservation. Under the directive, any proposed construction in a Natura 2000 site can only proceed after a so-called habitat assessment. If a construction is expected to do significant harm to the environment, the assessment needs to outline measures that can mitigate the damage or compensate for it. Journalists have been calling for the Polish authorities to share the assessment. The Polish authorities have dismissed these calls, citing provisions under the emergency laws passed to protect the border. A spokesperson from the General Directorate of Environmental Protection confirmed to me that the assessment, required under the EU Habitats Directive, was never produced. The EU seemed to acknowledge this. A spokesperson for the European Commission said in an email that the Commission had identified “procedural and formal deficiencies in the implementation of the border fence project.” However, the spokesperson said, a separate assessment submitted by Polish authorities had concluded that “the project would not have significant impact on the integrity” of the protected areas. This claim was disputed by every scientist who spoke to me.
The world’s militaries account for more than 5% of global carbon emissions, and their demands universally overshadow climate goals. Major global climate treaties include caveats exempting countries from having to account for emissions by their armed forces. If worldwide military emissions were a country, they would be the fourth-biggest polluter, after China, the U.S. and India. Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change on a global scale are expected to force millions of people from their homes, intensifying Europe’s migration crisis. In crude terms: Military expansion fuels climate change, which fuels migration, which in turn fuels military expansion. The vicious circle is a defining feature of the polycrisis. Multiple crises intertwine and exacerbate each other, worsening their respective impacts. The entanglement makes it harder to attribute an impact to a single cause, and to find a simple solution.
Last summer, I got talking to a soldier at a cafeteria in a village by the forest. He had been jogging with his colleagues and was wearing a brightly colored tracksuit. He asked me what there was to see in the area. “The forest, of course,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s a forest like any other.”
“It’s the most beautiful forest in Europe,” I persevered.
He did not look convinced. “We’d prefer to get out of here already.” As I was leaving, I overheard him order five large beers on tap.
This article was produced as part of the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and Neil Arun.
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