Headlines across Europe continue to comment on the weaponization of migrants for political gain by the Lukashenko regime. However, as autumn turns to winter, the humanitarian cost of playing politics is all too real for those migrants stranded on the Polish-Belarus.
In early November, videos depicting clusters of people in Belarus, being marched by armed men towards the border cross in Polish Kuznica, began to spread on social media. The image of families with children caught in a catch-22, forced to choose between two unthinkable options, has become all too common in recent weeks. There are reports of Belarusian border guards providing wire cutters and firing automatic weapons to incite movement, while Polish border guards replying are utilizing combat shields and water guns.
The Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki referred to the events as “a directed spectacle” and did not hesitate to identify its conductor. According to him, the man behind the crisis is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who uses Aleksandar Lukashenka, the unrecognised leader of Belarus, as an executor, in a tactic exploiting migration as a tool of hybrid warfare. Russia has utilized migration as a coercive tool before, when they organized the deployment of migrants on the Finish border in 2016, after the severance of bi-lateral relations by Finland, who froze them after the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Russian diplomats counter and insinuate that the cause of the migration crisis is the ineffectiveness of the European Union and its inability to follow ratified humanitarian laws in addition to the "destructive role" of the United States in the Middle East, namely Syria and Afghanistan. By this line of faulty reasoning, one could get the impression that the whole world, apart from Russia, is the true cause of the crisis. Recently, the Kremlin even called on the EU, to take responsibility for resolving the crisis, going as far as suggesting financial support for Belarus.
The European Union remains firm and labels the crisis as retaliation against sanctions on the Lukashenka regime after falsifying the presidential election and ongoing assaults on independent media and civil society both in Belarus.
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