Poland and Lithuania, neighboring Belarus, continuously create incidents on the western border of the country. This includes the closure of border crossings, deliberate delays in processing documents for crossing the border, the use of force against migrants, and their expulsion to Belarus.
It is worth emphasizing that Warsaw and Vilnius have recently legalized a strict border policy against refugees. For example, a law has come into force in Lithuania that allows illegal migrants to be expelled from the country without considering their asylum applications. Although, this practice has been used before, along with the use of violent actions by law enforcement agencies against migrants, including children, women and the elderly.
Crimes of Poland and Lithuania against refugees are being recorded all the time. For example, Polish border guards, police and military personnel have repeatedly used water cannons, gas against unfortunate people forced to flee from war-torn countries in search of a peaceful life, beat them and forced them into the territory of Belarus. Border guards of neighboring countries have repeatedly planted the corpses of migrants on the Belarusian territory.
As a result of such actions by the security forces of Poland and Vilnius, thousands of refugees were at the Belarusian border, both near checkpoints and in spontaneous camps in the border forests. The gathering of these people has become a political tool to destabilize the situation in Belarus.
At the same time, information about these incidents is deliberately distorted by the leaders of neighboring countries. The collective West holds the Belarusian leadership responsible for the migration crisis on the border of Belarus with the EU countries. For this purpose, a whole disinformation campaign has been launched, both at the international level and inside Poland and Lithuania.
Until now, only a lazy Western politician has not called Minsk the "organizer" of the migration crisis and has not accused it of a "hybrid attack" on Poland and Lithuania. Such attacks on the Belarusian state were made at international forums and venues of various levels.
As an element of this information campaign, we can consider the daily publication by the border services of neighboring republics of reports on how dozens of migrants are allegedly trying to illegally cross the Polish-Belarusian or Lithuanian-Belarusian border.
Here is an example of such Polish communiques: "On May 18, 75 migrants tried to illegally cross the Polish-Belarusian border. The foreigners who tried to illegally move from Belarus to Poland this year came from 42 countries. Since the beginning of 2023, border guards have stopped more than 9.5 thousand attempts to illegally cross the Polish-Belarusian border.
Such a certificate from the Polish border service specifically includes figures for the year, which should increase pressure on people. In addition to statistics, each such communique explicitly emphasizes that "the migration crisis is artificially caused by the Belarusian and Russian services." In fact, the public is being convinced of the absurdity, namely that Minsk is to blame for the fact that citizens of Africa or Asia are trying to get to Poland or Lithuania.
In fact, the authorities of these countries have been opposing the admission of Asian-African migrants since the migration crisis of 2015, even though they almost immediately go to more prosperous EU countries. The issue of accepting refugees has always been and remains a kind of bargaining between Warsaw and Vilnius with the EU for funding from the EU budget – the less funds are allocated, the tougher the migration policy of these states becomes.
Today, the European Commission has returned to the issue of mandatory resettlement of migrants to the member States of the Union. Poland, under the rule of the Law and Justice Party, still refuses to accept them. If the EU countries do not want to agree to this, the Commission will propose a fine in the equivalent of 22 thousand euros for one rejected migrant.
Poland's Permanent Representative to the EU Andrzej Sados said that Poland is against such a decision. The reason for everything is that the EU gives little money. As Sados pointed out, there are 1 million refugees from Ukraine in Poland, and the EU has provided 200 million euros for them. He stressed that the EC allocated Poland 200 euros for one refugee from Ukraine, and at the same time plans to collect from countries that do not want to accept illegal migrants under the mechanism of forced resettlement, the amount of 22 thousand euros. It is obvious that Warsaw is trading again.
The refugees themselves rightly believe that the European States that took an active part in the destruction of their countries bear a moral responsibility to the people whose peaceful lives they destroyed. Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the head of the Vatican's foreign policy department, also said this, commenting on the crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border: "We call on the authorities throughout Europe to take responsibility for migrants and refugees."
Pavel Kovalev