Alexander Lukashenko has made good on his threat to flood the European Union  with migrants by sending hundreds of Iraqis on “package holidays” to Lithuania in retaliation for sanctions.

Lithuania, an EU nation which shares a 700km border with Belarus, felt the pain days after the Belarusian leader issued the threat in late May.

Local border guards, who used to catch a few dozen trespassers a year, started to stumble upon groups of several dozen people every day who would surrender and say they were looking for refuge in the EU.

Lithuania this year received more than 507 migrants, mostly Iraqi men, from Belarus, six times higher than last year’s number. Most of them arrived over the past three weeks.

“We see that this flow is regulated by Belarusian authorities as a tool of political pressure, a means of hostile hybrid warfare,” Mantas Adomenas, Lithuania’s deputy foreign minister, said.

“We’re dealing with a dictator who is increasingly on the edge of madness and is prepared to do absolutely unspeakable and unpredictable things.”

Lukashenko was re-elected last year in a rigged vote that triggered months of unprecedented protests.

His crackdown on the opposition reached a new low in May when Belarusian authorities forced a Ryanair flight to land in Minsk, arresting a dissident journalist who was on board.

Europe responded with sanctions, including banning Belarusian flights from EU airspace. Lukashenko said he would have his revenge.

“We used to catch migrants in droves here,” he told parliament last month. “Now, forget about it. You’ll be catching them yourself.”

Lithuanian border guards have been detaining groups of asylum seekers, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan, every day since then.

Authorities in Lithuania are now considering building a wall with Belarus. Ingrida Simonyte, the Lithuanian prime minister, has accused the Belarusian government of orchestrating what her country views as a migrant crisis.

Four flights from Baghdad land in Minsk airport every week, and some carry as many as 600 passengers. There is no explanation why it suddenly became such a tourist magnet for the insurgency-ravaged country.

The state-owned travel agency Tsentrkurort is accused of providing package tours for asylum seekers from Iraq. Arnoldas Abromavicius, Lithuania’s deputy interior minister, said his country’s intelligence has “reports, lots of indirect evidence and some documents” showing that the Belarusian authorities are “involved in facilitating the passage” through Tsentrkurot.

Some of the asylum seekers caught at the border had their Belarusian visas dated that same day, leading the Lithuanians to think the visas could have been issued on the plane before they were dropped at the Lithuanian border.

Lithuanian authorities say the migrants paid unnamed individuals in their home countries $2,000-4,000 (€1,700-3,400) for a “package trip” from Baghdad to the EU border.

Abromavicius said Belarusian border guards told the Lithuanians of the asylum seekers: “Maybe those people fell from the sky.”

Rights activists who work with refugees in Belarus describe the sudden surge in asylum seekers from the Middle East as unprecedented.

 

© Telegraph Media Group Ltd (2021)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]