The Lithuanian State Border Guard Service asked the government of the republic to declare an extreme situation in connection with the growing flow of migrants. This was reported on Friday, July 2 by Interfax .
The head of the border service, Vidas Machaitis, said that the flows of arriving illegal immigrants “are growing every day, every week, there are problems for both the state and the service.”
In turn, the head of the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry Gabrielius Landsbergis said that “economic migrants who illegally crossed the border of the European Union should be returned to where they came from,” and the head of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, “should be deprived of the opportunity to fraudulently attract new persons intending to illegally enter the EU. “.
Today it became known that the Lithuanian border guards detained 150 illegal migrants at the border with Belarus. The vast majority of them are from the Middle East: Syria, Iraq and Iran. Since the beginning of the year, 822 illegal migrants have moved from Belarus to the territory of Lithuania.
According to the Lithuanian side, the Belarusian authorities are involved in organizing the flow of illegal migration. In particular, it is assumed that the delivery of Iraqis and Syrians is carried out by the state tour operator “Centerkurort” under the guise of selling tours. On the one hand, Minsk makes money on this, on the other hand, it uses migrants as an instrument of a hybrid war with the EU.
Observers previously noted that after the imposition of sanctions for the forced landing of a Ryanair liner with opposition leader Roman Protasevich, Lukashenko threatened to weaken control over drug trafficking and illegal migration. “We stopped drugs and migrants, now you will eat and catch them yourself,” the Belarusian leader said.
