Damascus-SANA
The crisis of thousands of migrants who have been present for days on the border between Belarus and Poland, which insists on preventing them from crossing its lands towards European countries, and uses the army and security to do so, is worsening, amid the deterioration of their conditions in light of very low temperatures that have reached the freezing point.
In a statement yesterday, the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned the Polish side against resorting to any provocation to justify new illegal hostilities against migrants, whom it described as poor civilians, including a large number of women and children.
Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrinin, in turn, rejected Polish accusations against his country of orchestrating the migration wave, saying that they are baseless and unjustified, accusing the Polish side of deploying thousands of soldiers on the common border without notifying Belarus and in violation of bilateral agreements signed between the two countries.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko discussed during a phone call yesterday the migrant crisis and expressed their concern about the presence of Polish forces on the border.
Poland continued to use all means to prevent migrants from entering its territory. "During the past 24 hours, the police have arrested more than 50 people near Bialewiesa after they crossed the border illegally," said Tomasz Krupa, a spokesman for the Podlaskie police.
And the Polish border guards announced that, during the past hours, they had thwarted 599 attempts to cross the border illegally from Belarus.
Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said in a radio statement, "The situation is not calm on the border, and about 15,000 soldiers are currently providing security on the border," noting that smaller groups of migrants are trying to penetrate his country's borders today.
Russia, for its part, rejected the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, the accusations of the Polish prime minister, who held Moscow responsible for the migration crisis on the border between Poland and Belarus.
"We consider the statements of the Polish prime minister that Russia is responsible for this situation completely irresponsible and unacceptable," Peskov said at a press conference today.
Yesterday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called on Poland to accept the migrants and said, "It is more useful for Polish politicians who attack the Belarusian president and accuse Minsk of causing the migrant crisis to remember that Warsaw played a prominent role in the destruction of Iraq."
In turn, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees expressed its concern about the migrant crisis and called for an end to the exploitation of vulnerable people for political purposes.
Mohammed Jassim