Belarus has sent some 2,000 migrants back to their countries as part of efforts to stop illegal migration, its foreign minister said on Friday, as Minsk faces accusations of encouraging the migrants to cross into Poland and Lithuania via its territory.
On Thursday, Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko shocked the world by saying he could cut off the supply of Russian natural gas into Europe. However, on Friday, according to the Daily Beast, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, while speaking to reporters, walked back the threat made by Lukashenko.
Conditions are deplorable near the Poland-Belarus border, where thousands of people, many of them from Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, are stranded at the center of what has become a humanitarian and geopolitical crisis, according to CNN.
The escalating crisis stems from accusations by Western leaders, including the prime ministers of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, that the regime in Belarus is manufacturing a migrant crisis on the EU’s eastern frontier as retribution for sanctions over human rights abuses.
Minsk, of course, denies the accusation.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the border crisis a “challenge to the whole of the European Union” earlier this week. “This is not a migration crisis. This is the attempt of an authoritarian regime to try to destabilize its democratic neighbors. This will not succeed,” she said.
On Friday, Russia and Belarus held joint paratrooper drills near Poland, exercises the Belarusian defense ministry said were “in connection with the buildup of military activity near the state border of the Republic of Belarus.”
In the meantime, a small team of British armed forces personnel has been deployed to Poland because of the growing tension at the border with Belarus. The UK troops will join some 15,000 Polish soldiers who have been deployed to Poland’s border with Belarus.
The announcement by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) was followed an hour later by confirmation that Royal Air Force fighter jets had to be scrambled on Friday to respond to two military aircraft from Russia, an ally of Belarus, approaching a “UK area of interest.”
Since the beginning of November, there have been 4,500 recorded border crossing attempts, according to Polish authorities. The Polish border guard said it had recorded around 1,000 crossing attempts in the last few days, including some “large-scale” efforts with groups of more than 100 people trying to breach the fence.
