Truss tells Putin to end ‘shameful’ migrant row

Kremlin has a clear responsibility to cease ‘crafted’ Belarus crisis, says Foreign Secretary

LIZ TRUSS has told Vladimir Putin he must end the “shameful manufactured migrant crisis” being stoked at Europe’s eastern borders.

In her first public intervention since tensions erupted this week, the Foreign Secretary said the Kremlin had a “clear responsibility” to end Belarus’s attempt to use “desperate migrants as pawns” to destabilise the region.

Writing for The Sunday Telegraph, Ms Truss added that Britain will “not look away” while its European allies are forced to “bear the brunt” of a “carefully crafted crisis” designed to distract from a “litany of abhorrent acts and human rights violations” carried out by Alexander Lukashenko’s regime.

UK officials fear that the crisis at Poland’s border could soon reach closer to home, with many of the migrants seeking entry into Europe expected to travel through France in order to try to cross the Channel and get to Britain.

Ms Truss also urged the European Union to strengthen its ties with other like-minded countries and to reconsider its dependence on Russia for gas supplies by cancelling Nord Stream 2 – the 745-mile pipeline running from Russia’s Baltic to north-east Germany.

Warning that the UK stood ready to act “robustly, decisively and relentlessly” to take on “malign actions, wherever they are in the world”, Ms Truss added: “Russia has a clear responsibility here. They must press the Belarusian authorities to end the crisis and enter into dialogue.”

Her comments come after British troops were deployed on Friday to help the Polish army strengthen its border with Belarus in response to Minsk sending waves of migrants towards the country. Mr Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, has been accused of manufacturing the crisis in retaliation for

Europe imposing sanctions over his unprecedented crackdown on prodemocracy protesters in the country.

Tensions at the border have escalated this week after Russia dispatched paratroopers to the Belarusian side of the border, where hundreds of Syrians, Iraqis and Yemenis are attempting to cross.

Warsaw has responded by moving 15,000 troops to the frontier and erecting barbed-wire fences, while the EU is also preparing to hit Belarus with a range of new sanctions this week.

In a further provocation, Mr Lukashenko yesterday called on Russia to move its nuclear-capable missiles to the border with the EU, telling a Russian journalist: “I’ve been pestering your president: I really need those 500km-range missile systems.”

Poland has also accused Belarusian security services of giving tear gas and strobe lights to migrants and encouraging them to push through barricades.

Mr Putin has suggested Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, could meet Mr Lukashenko in the coming days. While any talks will aim to de-escalate the crisis, it will inevitably be seen in Moscow and Minsk as a propaganda coup. Britain and its Nato allies believe it is an attempt by Belarus, backed by President Putin, to wage a “hybrid war”, with Mr Lukanshenko also threatening to cut off a key gas pipeline to Europe.

But there are now mounting fears that Russia could also be preparing to try to seize parts of Ukraine, in a repeat of the 2014 annexation of Crimea, amid reports that 90,000 troops are now stationed along its eastern frontier.

Pledging the UK’s support to Eastern Europe, Mr Truss writes: “The United Kingdom will not look away. We will stand with our allies in the region, who are on the frontier of freedom.

“We are not just standing side by side with Poland as they bear the brunt of this shameful manufactured migrant crisis, but also others in the Visegrád Four – Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic – and our friends in the Baltics and Ukraine.”

Short attention spans, wilful ignorance, wishful thinking and no strategic planning have preceded international debacles throughout history. That brings us to Belarus.

Thirty years after the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and dissolved, Western lassitude is enabling Russia’s possible total reabsorption of Belarus, the first former Soviet republic so endangered. Although Moscow’s goal elsewhere may be suzerainty rather than sovereignty, Vladimir Putin did annex Crimea from Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics are wavering under his relentless efforts to reverse three decades of their independence. From Eastern Europe to the Caucasus and Central Asia, Moscow has waged an increasingly successful campaign to assert hegemony. Books will be written about the West’s collectively feeble response. Indeed, Belarus and Ukraine may be under assault simultaneously, although in different ways and for different reasons. Russia’s latest military build-up along Ukraine’s border, if it is a serious threat, could well be a precursor for annexing a significant part of the Donbas region, currently under the control of Russianbacked paramilitaries.

Belarus, by contrast, is now the “schwerpunkt” of Kremlin activity that might involve a total re-amalgamation of the entire country. Obviously, by foreshadowing possible conflict in two theatres, Russia has expanded its options and confused its adversaries.

In Minsk, President Alexander Lukashenko is not yet fully under Russian control, and his unfolding efforts to flood Poland and the Baltic countries with imported Middle Eastern refugees (and threaten natural gas cutoffs) may be entirely his own plan. Unfortunately, Turkey’s earlier success in transferring Syrian refugees into Europe (abetted by Germany’s unilateral open-borders decision) is being repeated, as the European Union loses sight of the forced Russia-Belarus reunion while it scrambles to handle a potential new influx of migrants. Incredibly, Warsaw is actually being criticised for violating the “refugees’ human rights” by not considering them for asylum, as if they trekked to Poland on their own.

Whether Minsk’s idea or Moscow’s, this artificial refugee crisis – a form of “hybrid warfare” Putin has used adroitly – provides the distraction needed to justify both increased repression within Belarus and more serious provocations by Russia throughout its “near abroad”. Putin’s renewed troop build-ups and manoeuvres along the Ukrainian border may be part of a larger strategy.

Neither Washington nor Brussels has responded adequately to Belarus developments in recent years. America’s excuses for failure are Trump and Biden. Europe’s excuse is that the EU is still less than the sum of its parts; its primitive politico-military capabilities don’t match its rhetorical pipe organ. No Western country responded strategically to the extensive protests against the regime in Belarus in 2020, nor to Lukashenko’s kidnapping this year of opposition leader Roman Protasevich, an act of air piracy indicating that “hybrid warfare” was already underway. Biden missed significant opportunities to confront Putin on Belarus at their June 16 Geneva summit, and over September’s Zapad joint-military exercises in Belarus. Putin may think he has a green light.

Lukashenko’s clear preference is retaining authority in an independent Belarus. His Plan B is keeping power even if only as a Russian protectorate. The West’s problem is that sanctioning Minsk for suppressing its political opposition may not topple Lukashenko, but it may allow Putin in.

To paraphrase Lord Ismay, Nato’s first secretary general, our key objectives in Belarus should be to keep Russia out, a free Belarus government in, and Lukashenko down. Unfortunately, we are long past the point where we should have developed a coherent strategy to achieve these goals. Prudence therefore dictates being willing to accept what is probably the most we can get: a free, independent Belarus. At a minimum, we must avoid the worst-case outcome, with Russian bayonets keeping Lukashenko in power.

Virtue signallers in Europe and America would prize a successful “colour revolution” in Belarus, with Lukashenko and his fellow miscreants humiliated and ultimately imprisoned, but that is likely impossible. Menacingly, a plausible scenario is that the opposition stages larger and larger protests; Lukashenko panics and requests Russian military support; and Putin all too happily complies, with Belarus suppressed not under Lukashenko but under Putin, followed by reabsorption into Russia. If events took this turn, which might happen with sudden speed, Western capitals could do very little, other than engage in more useless virtue signalling about how unacceptable it all was.

Instead, we should find ways to make it attractive for Lukashenko, his family and top advisers to hand over power in exchange for a good life in exile (perhaps in a Gulf Arab country) and immunity from prosecution in Belarus. Western threats have not succeeded with Lukashenko, sadly, because the threats are not credible. A golden parachute for Lukashenko is credible if Western leaders recognise the unpleasant correlation of forces they face. If circumstances permit, Lukashenko can even be allowed to leave gracefully, pretending that his departure was his own plan. The key is getting him out of Minsk before Moscow can pretend to have heard an invitation to intervene.

In America, we call such a scenario “winning ugly”. But it beats losing, especially for the citizens of Belarus, not to mention Ukraine and the others.