(Kiev) Ukraine announced Thursday its intention to deploy thousands of border guards and police on its border with Belarus, amid a migration crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border that Brussels accuses Minsk of having orchestrated.
More than 2,000 migrants, including Kurds from the Near East, have been stranded for several days in a makeshift camp on the border between Poland and Belarus, where they warm themselves by burning wood to withstand temperatures close to 0 ° C. .
This situation is causing growing concern in the international community, and the UN Security Council is due to address this issue on Thursday.
Ukraine, which shares a border with Belarus to the north and Poland to the west, seeks to avoid an equivalent situation at its border, even if the main influx is observed more than 200 km from this former republic. Soviet.
The Ukrainian army will thus deploy 8,500 additional soldiers, including 3,000 border guards, 3,500 members of the National Guard and 2,000 police officers on the border between Ukraine and Belarus, Ukrainian Interior Minister Dionysius announced on Thursday. Monastyrsky.
If the Ukrainian border guards assured Thursday that “no threat” emanated from Belarusian territory, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country would “respond adequately” to any development of the situation at the border , during a telephone interview with his Lithuanian counterpart Gitanas Nauseda.
Europeans have accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko for weeks of fueling the crisis by issuing visas to migrants and bringing them to the border in revenge for European sanctions.
For its part, Belarus threatened Thursday to respond to possible new European sanctions, agitated by Brussels, by closing the valves of a major gas pipeline passing through its territory.