April 12, Pozirk. Poland sees more indications that Alaksandar Łukašenka wants to use migration and tension at shared border for his political ends again, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told his Estonian counterpart Kaja Kallas, his press office reported.
Their Warsaw meeting on April 11 took place on the sidelines of the ongoing European Union’s consultations on policy priorities.
Tusk stressed that he would urge all of Poland’s European partners to prioritize issues of illegal migration to make the EU tighten border security.
The statement came the day after border guards and soldiers in Poland’s Podlaskie region stopped a group of more than 220 migrants coming from Belarus.
Meanwhile, Alaksandar Łukašenka on April 11 complained to Russian President Vladimir Putin about tension at the border with Poland.
“And Lithuanians, Latvians. . . . First, they throw tens of dead bodies across the border. A certain number of migrants is going there; and they push them back. They have built the fence. So, they throw them over the fence to us at the border. As snow melted, dead bodies became exposed right there at the border,” his press office quoted him as saying.
The migration crisis at the Belarusian-EU border started in spring 2021 after Łukašenka, angered by EU sanctions, had indicated that Minsk would not prevent migrants from Africa and Asia from using Belarus as a route to the EU.
It escalated in November 2021, with hundreds of migrants storming the Polish border.
In June 2021, the Belarusian government announced the suspension of a readmission agreement with the EU in response to sanctions that followed the forced landing of a Ryanair flight in Minsk in an operation by Belarusian security services.
Pozirk’s analysis of daily stats indicated fluctuated tension at the Belarusian-EU border throughout 2023 with illegal border crossings picking up the pace in February and Poland being the major target.
The Baltic states and Poland accused Belarusian authorities of creating the trouble, while the latter blamed it on the West.
In August 2023, the interior ministers of Poland and the Baltic States warned that they might close the border with Belarus in response to a surge in illegal migration.
