“As of today, nobody is allowed to cross the border from either side, neither from the south nor from the west,” said ruler Alexander Lukashenko on Thursday in the capital Minsk, according to the state agency Belta. The EU accuses Belarus of deliberately allowing migrants to cross its border towards the European Union.
In the past, Lukashenko has openly threatened to allow people from countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria to cross the border in response to the EU sanctions imposed on his country. In the past few weeks, for example, the EU border protection agency Frontex has sent additional personnel to Lithuania to prevent illegal border crossings.
In the Baltic EU country, several hundred migrants have illegally crossed the border from neighboring Belarus in the past few weeks. According to official information, around 3,500 people have been apprehended at the almost 680 kilometer long border with Belarus this year. Most of them applied for asylum. Lithuania is one of the greatest advocates of the democracy movement in the neighboring country and has long been a refuge for the Belarusian opposition.
Lukashenko now obviously wants to prevent the EU from sending the captured migrants back to Belarus. He said that it would be a “threat” to his country if migrants were collected at the crossing points and then “deported to Belarus under the threat of armed violence”. The EU had never expressed such intentions.