Weaponizing Refugees
Jay Ramesh
You don’t always need to arm people with weapons to send a message. Sometimes, states use people themselves as weapons.
Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has been inviting and even busing migrants to the Polish border in an attempt to destabilize the country and the EU as a whole. At least 11 migrants have died during the crisis, and during the past week, migrants have made hundreds of attempts to cross the border.
The move appears to be in retaliation for sanctions placed on Belarus after an election in 2020 many in the West saw as fraudulent and anti-democratic. The US imposed even further sanctions after Lukashenko forced the landing of a passenger plane to arrest a journalist that had spoken out against him. The standoffish migrant crisis appears to be in retaliation to these punitive measures.
The migrants aren’t locals, either. European leaders have accused Lukashenko of flying thousands of people from the Middle East to Belarus, building migrant camps right across from the Polish border, and helping them attempt to breach the border.
The crisis has also put the EU in a difficult situation. In October of 2021, the EU had fined Poland for failing to comply with European legal standards. Now, the EU has to stand up for Poland as having a destabilized border threatens Europe as a whole and leaves it vulnerable to waves of migrants it is not prepared to receive.
But the migrant crisis is just one move in a larger chess game between the EU and Russia. In a repeat of events in April of 2021, Russian troops are once again massing at the border of Ukraine, a neighbor to both Belarus and Ukraine. This time, 80,000-90,000 Russian troops are being mobilized in an effort to intimidate Ukraine out of officially joining NATO.
Russia has repeatedly pushed its luck against the EU through aggressive military posturing, aircraft incursions, and supporting the Novorossiya rebels in eastern Ukraine. The migrant crisis brewing in Poland means that Belarus, a staunch ally of Russia, is adding another dimension to this standoff. As tensions have been rising between the two camps throughout 2021, many fear that the escalation of the migrant crisis and military buildup could explode into a full-on armed conflict.
Despite all this, we must not ignore the humanitarian costs of this crisis. Many migrants are fleeing war and poverty in their home countries and are simply being used as pawns in a larger game between rival countries. Belarussian refugee camps often have extremely poor conditions, with little protection from the harsh Belarussian winter coupled with a dire lack of both food and medical supplies. No matter who wins in the conflict, the true losers will be the hundreds of refugees forced to be the pawns in a larger game puppeteered by the Russians against the EU.