According to the European Commissioner for Internal Affairs, Ylva Johansson, the situation with the flow of migrants on the EU-Belarus border has eased. “Now we have a clear de-escalation of the situation,” she said on Friday, January 21, at a conference in Vilnius.
According to Johansson, the ruler of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, “seems to have lost interest in using migrants” for his own purposes. Nevertheless, the European Commissioner stressed, it is important to remain vigilant in the future.
European Commissioner: expulsion is illegal
At the same time, the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, who visited the border between Lithuania and Belarus, stressed that the expulsion of migrants from the EU is illegal: “People have the right to seek asylum.” According to humanitarian organizations, about 8,200 people were expelled from the territory of the European Union only on the border between Lithuania and Belarus.
Johansson also spoke out against the construction of border fences, which Lithuania, Latvia and Poland erected after Belarusian authorities began bringing refugees from the Middle East to the EU borders last summer. “If Member States want to build fences, they can do it, but the position of the European Commission has long been not to fund walls or fences with barbed wire,” said the European Commissioner for Home Affairs.
Brussels accuses the Belarusian ruler Lukashenko of deliberately redirecting migrant flows from crisis regions to Minsk, in order to then smuggle them into the EU in order to destabilize the situation in the West – in retaliation for the sanctions imposed on Belarus by the European Union due to fraud in the presidential elections in the summer of 2020.
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