Context: In September 2026, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and Belarusian Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov met in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. They discussed the border situation and regional security. Sikorski described the meeting as introductory and announced the upcoming opening of the new Polish Embassy building in Minsk. He said that the dialogue was made possible by the stabilization of the situation at the border, which was achieved through the construction of Polish border fences and the release of political prisoners, including Andrzej Poczobut. Poczobut is a journalist and an activist for the Union of Poles in Belarus. Following his release from prison, he traveled to Belarus on September 8, 2026, and then returned to Poland on September 15.
On September 20, 2026, a segment about the “first and so far only museum of national unity” in Baranavichy aired on the program Main Broadcast. The segment depicted “life in the city as part of Poland, with its accompanying unemployment, shortage of doctors, and inability to obtain a basic education.”
“During the first ten years of Polish rule, the population of Baranavichy fell from 28,000 to 22,000. That’s a decline of more than 20%. Unemployment was chronic,” the correspondent reported.
The Polish statistical compendium based on the 1931 census does indeed cite similar population figures for Baranavichy: approximately 28,000 in 1921 and nearly 23,000 in 1931. However, the comparison is misleading without the footnote in the same source. It explains that the 1921 figure included 16,630 people staying in the Reemigration Office barracks. These were people returning to Poland, including refugees and prisoners of war. They were temporarily housed in Baranavichy, a major railway hub.
In the footnote, the statistical office clarifies that, excluding these people, the city’s population nearly doubled over the ten years. Main Broadcast did not provide this clarification.
Source: Centralna Biblioteka Statystyczna [Central Statistical Library of Poland] / “Wiadomości Statystyczne” [“Statistical News”], No. 7, March 5, 1932
A separate figure for the population of Baranavichy also appears in a collection published following the 1921 census: around 11,500 people. The nearly 23,000 residents in 1931 should be compared with this figure.
Of the Belarusian cities included in the Polish statistics, not a single one experienced a population decline over the ten-year period.
* The First News Channel is another name for News.by, a news outlet owned by Belteleradiocompany.
