We still don’t know when the European Commission will finally publish its report on which countries are officially “under migratory pressure.” But Poland has been on its victory lap for days. The government says it has secured a one-year relief from relocations and financial contributions under the EU’s migration pact, which is recognition, it argues, for taking in millions of Ukrainians and holding the line on Belarus’s weaponised migration campaign on its border.
“I said there would be no relocation of migrants to Poland — and there won’t be. Done,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X, claiming success after months of talks in Brussels.
Across the region, others facing their own migration strains — from Lithuania and Latvia to Romania and Slovakia — are watching closely and surely wondering: hey, what about us? he Commission was supposed to publish its first list of pressure states this week, but quietly dropped the item from Wednesday’s European Council agenda, saying the report will come later in October.
Legally, Poland’s relief isn’t an opt-out. It’s built into the pact itself. The migration pact allows one-year exemptions for countries officially classed as being under “migratory pressure.” After that, the status is reviewed. If Poland’s pressure eases, the relief disappears, and it will have to accept the assigned quota or pay a €20,000 contribution per person.
Currently, Poland stands to avoid the relocation of roughly 2,000 asylum seekers from a European pool of 20,000. In future years, those numbers could look very different.
Poland’s bargaining power
Poland got its relief by working the system hard, even though it voted against the migration pact when EU ministers approved it in May 2024, alongside Slovakia and Hungary.
From that point, Warsaw started building its case that it had already done more than enough, arguing that no other EU country has taken in as many Ukrainians or spent as much on securing the Union’s border with Belarus.Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Poland has registered around 1.4 million Ukrainians under temporary protection, with millions more passing through.
Poland has spent more than €470 million on securing its border with Belarus, including around €370 million for a 5.5-metre steel wall completed in 2022 and another €72 million for an electronic barrier of cameras and sensors added the following year.
Its message has been repeated for months in meetings, press briefings, and every border visit arranged for European officials.
When Commission President Ursula von der Leyen came to Warsaw earlier this year, she said the EU would “take into account” Poland’s extraordinary refugee burden and border role.
Behind the scenes, ministers kept up the pressure, bringing visiting EU and U.S. officials to the frontier and arguing that Poland’s contribution to Europe’s safety couldn’t be measured in quotas.
Poland’s relief has inevitably drawn attention across the region. Other countries along the EU’s eastern border face similar migration pressures, yet their situations and their standing in Brussels look very different.
The Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – are dealing with the same Belarus-driven hybrid crossings that Poland faces, but on a smaller scale.
Their borders are shorter, their populations smaller, and their political weight in is Brussels limited. They’ve built fences, tightened asylum rules and coordinated with Poland on border security, yet there’s been no sign so far that any of them will get Poland-style relief in this first cycle.
Further south, Romania could make a reasonable case. It’s seen more than six million Ukrainian border crossings since 2022 and still hosts hundreds of thousands of people under temporary protection.