(Moscow) Belarus said on Monday that it was working to bring migrants camping on the border with Poland “home”, with assurances coming as the EU wants to sanction Minsk because of the migration crisis.
Several thousand people, many of them children, often from Iraqi Kurdistan, spent another night outside in freezing temperatures, warming themselves in tents or in front of log fires, according to images released by state media. Belarus.
They also released new photos and videos of a crowd of would-be emigrants to the EU piling up at the border, separated by barbed wire from helmeted, masked and deployed Polish law enforcement agencies. .
The heads of diplomacy of the countries of the European Union are meeting in Brussels to adopt punitive measures, believing that Minsk orchestrated the situation in response to a previous wave of sanctions decided after the repression of the opposition in this country.
Belarusian President Alexander Loukachenko has assured that he does not want a conflict at his border and to work for the return of migrants “to their homes”.
” We are ready […] to put them all on planes to bring them home, ”he said, according to state agency Belta. “Active work is underway to convince these people”.
“These people, it must be said, are stubborn,” he added. “They don’t want to go home. It is clear that they no longer have a place to return, no more home, and have nothing to feed their children there ”.
“Never done that”
The words of the unpredictable Mr. Lukashenko did not seem to convince the Europeans.
“I have no reason to believe that what he is saying is true,” said Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis. The German Heiko Maas had earlier assured that the EU would “toughen” its sanctions.
The Europeans accuse Minsk of having organized since the summer of migratory movements from the Middle East to the Polish and Lithuanian borders in revenge for Western sanctions.
“We have never done that and we do not intend to do it”, denied Monday Lukashenko, before warning the EU: “They want to scare with sanctions, they think that I’m kidding, but nothing like that, we are going to defend ourselves, ”he said, echoing his Foreign Minister who had warned that any punitive measure would prove to be“ counterproductive ”.
The Belarusian president had previously said he was ready to cut off the transit of Russian gas to Europe via his country, but Moscow, overlord of Minsk, quickly downplayed the scope of the threat. President Vladimir Putin, however, felt that the Europeans had to resume dialogue with the Belarusians.
Russia has also rejected accusations by Warsaw, which sees Moscow as the sponsor of the migration crisis, amid growing Russian-Western tensions.
On Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov again deemed “wrong” to blame all the responsibility for the crisis on Minsk and regretted that the EU “ignores European ideals of humanism” by failing to help migrants stranded outside in the cold.
Warsaw refuses to let these thousands of people pass, while the European Union has already been destabilized from 2015 by an influx of hundreds of thousands of unfortunate people fleeing wars and misery in the Middle East or Afghanistan.
While some groups have crossed the barbed wire in recent days, they have often been picked up and sent back to Belarus.
Polish border guards said Monday morning that they had pushed back a group of around sixty “aggressive” migrants, some “throwing stones”.
Then a new crowd of hundreds of migrants gathered at a closed border crossing between Poland and Belarus, facing rows of Polish police and soldiers, according to videos posted by Polish border guards and the Polish military.
“More and more groups of migrants are being brought to the Kuznica border crossing by Belarusian forces,” the Polish defense ministry said on Twitter.
At the same time, the Belarusian airline Belavia announced on Sunday that Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and Yemenis were now banned from flying from Dubai to Belarus, on “decision of the competent authorities of the United Arab Emirates”. Turkey did the same last week.
For its part, the Iraqi government announced the organization on Thursday of a first repatriation flight for Iraqi migrants stranded on the border between Belarus and Poland “on a voluntary basis”.