Poland has sent in 15,000 troops along with police and border guards, and has warned of an “armed escalation”, as the United States and European Union urge Minsk to stop what they describe as an orchestrated influx.
“What we are facing here, we must be clear, is a manifestation of state terrorism,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told reporters in Warsaw at a news conference with visiting EU chief Charles Michel.
Lukashenko, closely allied with Russia, has openly threatened to weaponise migrants against the EU in retaliation for international sanctions after last year’s disputed election.
“We were stopping migrants and drugs – now you will catch them and eat them yourselves,” Lukashenko told the Belarusian parliament in May.
Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says Belarus’ weaponisation of migrants is a classic case of “grey-zone warfare”.
“By callously using human beings as a weapon, Lukashenko will succeed in his plan to harm the EU,” she wrote in Defense One.
“But because no soldier has crossed an EU or NATO border, neither the EU nor NATO has a strategy for how to lessen the blow of the aggression, let alone punish it.”
Braw, author of The Defender’s Dilemma: Identifying and Deterring Gray-Zone Aggression, said this was just the beginning, with Belarus planning to sharply increase the number of airline flights from Middle Eastern cities into Minsk over winter to 55 per week.
“This is where Lukashenko’s sinister game gets even cleverer,” she wrote.
“The Belarusian ruler knows that immigration is a hugely divisive issue within the European Union, and within individual EU member states. Poland’s strategy of pushing migrants back into Belarus has already caused a rift with Brussels – and thus worsened Poland’s already tense relations with EU headquarters.”