Oh, one more fun tidbit: note how Torygraph transcribe's Lukashenka's name as 'Lukashenko'. This is a hint of Russian being in the transliteration chain.

'-enko' and similar endings are common for names of a fuzzy cultural zone that covers roughly the current area of Ukraine and Belarus, and some nearby areas. Lukashenka has just this sort of name. However, under Belarusian orthographic canons, his name is originally spelt 'Лукашэнка', whose direct transliteration is 'Lukashenka'. However, under Russian otrhography, the -a suffix sounds feminine, which the #Patriarchy considers unfitting for a Great Dictator, so in Russian sources, his name gets slightly altered, to 'Lukashenko', which lacks that taint of femininity — to a Russian ear. Thus, Torygraph, which does not have the grammatic gender problem since English doesn't have such anymore, spelling his name as 'Lukashenko' rather than 'Lukashenka' suggests that they might be translating from a text that has been in Russian at some point in its lifecycle.

@oblomov Yep. Kind of "flows naturally" from the big brouhaha about Palestinian tunnels.

Btw, fun fact: North Korea is known to have high-level expertise for tunnel construction, and also known to actively trade in humans with Russia recently. Coincidence? Could be. Why didn't it come up in this article's speculative attribution section? I submit, it's most likely because the bog-standard Western xenophobe is not as used to thinking of North Koreans as Designated Bad People as they're used to so thinking about Muslims, especially Middle Eastern looking ones.

@ellenor2000 I was not. Eeek. Guess I'll have to find another one.

In a better world, a service like this would digitally cryptographically sign and timestamp articles that it archives, to make tampering evident. This happens to be one of the legitimate uses of a Merkle chain, or as the kids these days call it, a "blockchain".

@GreenSkyOverMe I'm not sure the tunnels are real, tbh. The article's sourcing looks awfully problematic. But if they are, they were most likely not government-constructed or even migrant-constructed, but dug by some sort of underground economic collective (often dysphemised as "organised crime group") for smuggling something that is cheap in Belarus into Poland, or vice versa. Tobacco and alcohol are some likely candidates; both have significantly higher excise taxes levied on them inside EU than in Russia's customs union / "Union State", and various creative means of smuggling them have been found on several sites of the EU's eastern border before. My favourite example was somebody installing a cross-border pipe near Pihkwa/Pskow for pouring vodka directly into EU without paying the importation taxes.

Going the other way, Russia has in the past few years had trouble importing a lot of elementary things, such as microchips and high-quality ball bearing balls, and an enterprising criminal might prefer to move such into Belarus through a covered tunnel rather than where the Polish border guards' fancy new surveillance drones might see him violating the sanctions regime.