Lithuania says Belarus using refugees as ‘political weapon’

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union should consider imposing more sanctions on Belarus because Minsk is flying in migrants from abroad to send them illegally into the bloc, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said on Monday.

His government accuses Belarusian authorities of sending hundreds of mainly Iraqi migrants across the border into Lithuania, an EU member state.

Lithuania began building a 550km. razor wire barrier on its frontier with Belarus on Friday, a move that EU foreign ministers, lawmakers and officials discussed in a series of separate meetings in Brussels.

“When refugees are used as a political weapon... I will talk to my colleagues in order for the European Union to have a common strategy,” Landsbergis said as he arrived for the meeting of EU foreign ministers.

He suggested the migrants were being turned into a means of pressure on the EU, which has imposed a series of sanctions on Belarus since a disputed presidential election last August that was followed by a police crackdown on street protests.

“We need to be very strict with the regimes that are using these sorts of weapons, first of all with sanctions,” Landsbergis said.

Lithuanian center-right EU lawmaker Rasa Jukneviciene told a meeting with EU and Lithuanian officials that Belarus and Russia were organizing human smuggling networks with the help of Iran to fly people to the Lithuanian border, although she did not provide any evidence. Minsk and Moscow deny any such operations.

Landsbergis said the EU should draw up a fifth package of sanctions, following the blacklisting of Belarusian officials that began as a response to the presidential election but now seek to punish wider abuses. President Alexander Lukashenko has denied electoral fraud.

Last month, the EU slapped broad economic sanctions on Belarus’s main export industries, and on banks and finance, to try to hit sources of revenue for Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994.

EU leaders were outraged when Belarusian authorities intercepted a passenger plane flying between Athens and Vilnius on May 23 and arrested a dissident journalist and his girlfriend who were on board.

Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry has told Reuters it will propose a gradual expansion of the economic sanctions.

FLYING MIGRANTS HOME

The EU border guard agency Frontex said on Monday it would send additional officers, patrol cars and experts to talk to migrants that have reached Lithuania to gather information on criminal networks.

“The situation at Lithuania’s border with Belarus remains worrying. I have decided to send a rapid border intervention to Lithuania to strengthen the EU’s external border,” Frontex executive director Fabrice Leggeri said in a statement.

Leggeri later told EU officials and lawmakers that Frontex was preparing to fly migrants out of Lithuania with a mix of commercial and charter flights for those not granted refugee status by Vilnius.

In the first week of July, Lithuanian authorities recorded more than 800 illegal border crossings at its border with Belarus, according to Frontex. While in the first half of the year most migrants came from Iraq, Iran and Syria, the agency said, nationals of Congo, Gambia, Guinea, Mali and Senegal accounted for the majority of arrivals so far in July.