Merkel asks Putin for help on Belarus border
GERMANY’S Chancellor Angela Merkel has asked Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to intervene with Belarus over the migrant situation on the country’s border with Poland.
The Chancellor’s office said Ms Merkel spoke to Mr Putin yesterday and “underlined the fact that the instrumentalisation of migrants against the European Union by the Belarusian regime is inhuman and completely unacceptable, and asked the Russian president to exert his influence on the regime in Minsk”.
Russia is a close ally of the government in Belarus, while Germany is a favoured destination for migrants who arrive in the European Union. Details of the call released by the Kremlin said Mr Putin proposed a discussion of the problems that have come up between EU member nations and Belarus. The Kremlin also said that Mr Putin and Ms Merkel
“agreed to continue the conversation on the issue”.
Meanwhile, the European Union has said for the first time that it is discussing possibly funding a wall on the EU’s external borders. The EU’s executive commission has never allowed EU money to be used to finance walls, fences or barriers, but is facing pressure by several member countries to do so now.
European Council president Charles Michel, who oversees the EU’s political agenda and meetings of European leaders, said during a visit to Warsaw yesterday that the European Commission would discuss the possibility of financing “physical infrastructure at the borders” in coming days.
During a visit aimed at showing support for Poland, Mr Michel said that Poland was facing a “serious crisis” and a “brutal attack” and deserved solidarity from the rest of the 27-nation EU.
Poland’s Defence Ministry and local police reported that multiple groups of migrants tried to enter the country from Belarus late on Tuesday and early yesterday, but that all the people who made it were detained. Hundreds of migrants have been camping since Monday on the Belarus side of the border, near the Polish village of Kuznica.
Poland’s Defence Ministry accused Belarus forces of firing shots into the air in a border area where migrants caught between the neighbouring countries have set up a makeshift camp.
In recent months, Poland, Lithuania and, to a lesser degree, Latvia, all EU members located on the bloc’s eastern border, have complained about unusually high numbers of migrants entering or trying to enter the countries from Belarus. EU leaders accuse the regime of Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko of opening up a new migration route to Europe to create instability, in retaliation for sanctions the bloc imposed on Mr Lukashenko’s authoritarian government.
The EU imposed the sanctions over a brutal crackdown on domestic dissent, following Mr Lukashenko’s disputed election to a sixth term in August last year.
Caught in the bitter political stand-off have been thousands of migrants, some of them families with children, who have been pushed back and forth in a forested area of swamps and bogs at the PolandBelarus border.
Eight deaths in the area have been confirmed so far, and the situation is growing even more dangerous as temperatures drop to below freezing at night.