Tensions escalate at Poland-Belarus border as migrants face dire conditions

As the standoff over migrants gathering along the European Union’s eastern flank grew more precarious 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 Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’ 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 EU or from going back into Belarus. It is, according to Western officials, a hybrid attack with people used as weapons.

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In Poland, the government’s hard-line policy and its refusal to allow aid workers or even church doctors near the frontier has played well with its right-wing base among Polish nationalists, who Thursday were holding an annual march through the centre of Warsaw to celebrate Independence Day.

In a statement posted on Facebook, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland compared events Thursday to those that cost Poland its statehood more than a century ago. While stressing that the situation now “is not so dramatic,” he said: “What we are dealing with is a new type of war. This is a war in which civilians and media messages are the ammunition.”

Lukashenko reeled off threats to his country’s western neighbours even as the Kremlin, Lukashenko’s main benefactor, said it was working to resolve the situation.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia spoke to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for the second day in a row about the crisis, the Kremlin said, but he repeated his desire that European officials speak directly to their Belarusian counterparts — a nonstarter for many in the West who consider Lukashenko’s rule to be illegitimate.

Lukashenko told government officials in a televised meeting Thursday that he had agreed with Russia on patrols by nuclear-capable bombers of the country’s western borders. He also said he could shut down the flow of a major pipeline carrying natural gas from Russia to Western Europe via Belarus if the West escalated sanctions.

“We are warning Europe, and yet they threaten to close the border,” Lukashenko said, according to the Belarusian state news agency. “What if we close off the natural gas headed there? I would recommend the leadership of Poland, the Lithuanians and other brainless people to think before they speak.”

With temperatures dropping below freezing along the Belarusian border with Poland and Lithuania, both members of the European bloc, alarm is growing among aid workers that the number of deaths from exposure will increase sharply. So far, eight people have died, officials say, but the real number could be much higher.

With soldiers sealing off the border zone from news media and aid workers, the reported death of the 14-year-old Kurdish boy could not be confirmed. The boy’s body, according to a report by OKO.press, had been taken away overnight by Belarusian security services.

Poland and Belarus have both barred journalists from entering the border area and are locked in an escalating information war, each blaming the other for a deepening crisis fed by inflammatory statements about the risk of armed conflict.

In a sign of escalating tension, Poland’s defence ministry Thursday reported that its soldiers in the frontier area of Białowieza had fired warning shots into the air the previous day after “a group of several hundred migrants attempted to cross the border by force.” The migrants, the ministry said, threw objects at the soldiers and then tried to destroy a border fence.

Polish border guards said Thursday that 150 migrants had tried to cross the border from Belarus en masse overnight.

Polish officials warned of a possible attempt to “storm” the frontier Thursday evening, noting that Independence Day events scheduled across Poland had spread the security services thin, a situation that could encourage Belarus to push a new wave of people to the border.