After unsuccessful attempts to cross the Belarusian-Polish border, a group of about 5,000 migrants could try to reach Western Europe via Ukraine, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Poland saw migrants move to the Belarusian side of the common border on Wednesday, which increased the likelihood of using other routes.
Thousands of migrants on one side, thousands of soldiers, border guards, and police on the other. For several days now, this has been the situation at the Polish-Belarusian border at the Kuznica-Bruzgi crossing, where migrants have been trying unsuccessfully to pass at all costs and get into the European Union. However, on Wednesday noon, the Belarusian side suddenly brought buses to the site. According to Maciej Wasik, Poland’s deputy interior minister, it took the refugees to an unknown destination.
Ukrainian border guards stated that they had prevented 15 people from the Middle East who claimed to be tourists from entering the country. This is the first such case on Ukraine’s borders since a migrant crisis erupted between Belarus and its European Union neighbors.
“Members of the border guards didn’t allow these people to enter the Ukrainian territory, and they returned them to the Republic of Belarus,” the statement said. Media in Poland and Slovakia speculate that migrants could soon cross the Belarus-Ukraine border, which is less guarded, after failing at the Polish border. They have been moved to large halls, but Ukrainian services have signaled that about 5,000 migrants are near the Belarusian-Ukrainian border.
The Polish deputy interior minister also indicated that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who had lured thousands of refugees mainly from Middle Eastern countries into thinking they could quickly get from his country to Germany via Poland, was “surprised by the strong Polish resistance.” According to him, Lukashenko seems to have lost this battle for the border.
A spokeswoman for Belarus’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, said about 7,000 refugees in the country. Minsk is proposing that the European Union should create a humanitarian corridor to Germany for 2,000 of them. The first Iraq-organized repatriation flight of migrants took off from Minsk on Thursday. The Iraqi Airways flight to Baghdad checked in 431 people, according to Iraqi diplomats.
Polish security forces on Thursday night detained a group of about 100 migrants who tried to cross the border illegally, the Polish defense ministry said. According to a spokeswoman for the Polish border guards, five foreigners, including three children, were taken to hospital.
On Thursday evening, a spokeswoman for the Polish Border Guard reported that Belarusian authorities had cleared the makeshift camps near the border with Poland and moved the migrants to a logistics center near the Kuznica-Bruzgi border crossing. Belarusian border guards said that all the migrants had voluntarily moved from the camp to the center because of the worsening weather. However, videos appear on Twitter showing that the logistics center, where people are arriving, is already overcrowded.
“The situation was good on the first day. We got three meals a day. But as more and more people came from the forest, it became more and more crowded. Because of that, we didn’t get dinner on Wednesday and lunch on Thursday, “a young Iraqi Kurd witnessed. “It’s no longer easy to find a place to sleep here, but it’s better than staying in the woods,” he added.