A Crisis the West Says Belarus Engineered Turns Dire for Migrants

THE NEW YORK TIMES: With thousands stranded at the border of the European Union’s eastern flank, the Polish prime minister accused Belarus of using people like “ammunition.” The autocratic leader of Belarus raised the prospect of disrupting the flow of natural gas through his country to Europe.


Hundreds of people, largely from the Middle East, camped at the Belarus-Poland border in frigid weather seeking to enter Poland. Western officials say Belarus is trying to orchestrate a refugee crisis at its borders with the European Union. | Polish Defence Ministry, via Reuters
WARSAW — As the standoff over migrants gathering along the European Union’s eastern flank grew more precarious on Thursday, with Polish news media reporting that a 14-year-old boy from Iraq had frozen to death on the Belarus side of the frontier, the language from political leaders on either side of the razor wire ratcheted up.

Western leaders have accused Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Belarus’s autocratic leader, of engineering the crisis — creating a path into European Union countries for migrants from the Middle East.

Thousands of migrants have been escorted to the borders of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia under the watchful eyes of the Belarusian authorities. And once there, they are stranded in bitter cold, prevented from entering the E.U. or from going back into Belarus. It is, according to Western officials, a hybrid attack with people used as weapons. Tensions escalate at the Poland-Belarus border as migrants face dire conditions. » | Andrew Higgins and Anton Troianovski | Thursday, November 11, 2021