In the second half of 2021, a systematic effort by the Belarusian government created a crisis on the EU’s eastern border: the authorities in Minsk began bringing would-be migrants into Belarus, then transporting them to the frontier with Poland and the Baltic states. Although Russia’s subsequent full-scale invasion of Ukraine drew attention away from the manufactured problem, the situation has only gotten worse. In 2024 alone, 17,000 people entered the EU illegally through Belarus — three times more than in the year before.
Refugees are undeterred by the physical obstacles — metal fences topped with barbed wire — which Lithuania and Poland erected in 2022 (with Latvia planning to finish its own by the end of this year). Numerous accounts have been collected showing that Belarusian border guards themselves transported migrants all the way up to the barriers, and when a similar crisis broke out on the Russian-Finnish border in 2023,
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Russia’s FSB had played the leading role in creating that copycat scheme. Now, a former Belarusian border guard tells […] how he escorted migrants to the border, while an Iranian refugee described how he managed to cross into the EU in 2023 with the help of the Belarusian authorities.
We were bound by a separate set of instructions signed by Alexander Lukashenko. For instance, it said that upon spotting a suspicious person in the border zone, we had to fire two warning shots into the air and a third directly at the person. – A former conscript of the Belarusian Border Service.
The officers started shouting slogans about Lithuanian enemies and instructing us on how we would move migrants across the border into Lithuania. – A former conscript of the Belarusian Border Service.
They [the Belarusian border guards] warned us: if you go back to Belarus, they’ll beat you up. --* M., an Iranian refugee*
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Belarus already is sanctioned. Humanitarian duties are not dependent on who is responsible. It is the legal obligation of Poland and the EU to provide for these people. It is equally their legal obligation not to torture them, push them back across the border or in some cases kill them.
Belarus cannot scale up these operations indefinitely and it would be comparable easy for the EU to deport people back to Iraq or other countries of origin, if it is found that they are not at a danger in those countries. They are undeniably at danger in the “death zone” between the border fences.
In the current situation Putin and Lukashenko get exactly what they want. They can show to the world that the EU countries are criminals, who give fuck all about human rights and international law when it doesn’t fit their larger political goals. Furthermore it helps keeping the narrative of refugee “crisis” going, which helps the Russian backed Fascists like the AfD, Front National and the like. By simply not making it a crisis, it wouldn’t be a crisis, but the deep rooted Racism in the “middle” of many EU countries pushes them to imagine a crisis and help the Fascists. They also know that this helps the Fascists but they keep doing it, because less Racism and more human rights is seen as worse than a Fascist takeover.
Meanwhile countries like Poland, Germany, France, Italy and others are running into a demographic crisis. They urgently need younger people. By reinforcing the hatred towards migrants and refugees, Russia also helps maintain the EU to get weaker demographically. A problem Russia is facing at an unprecedented level themselves, now that they send their young men to die in Ukraine by the hundreds of thousands.