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Airport in Minsk: According to official information, more than 400 Iraqis are to be flown out on the first special flight
Photo: Stringer / imago images / ITAR-TASS
They came to Belarus because they wanted to travel on from there to the European Union.
Thousands of refugees have been given Belarusian tourist visas in the past few weeks and purposefully smuggled to the EU borders.
Hundreds of people are now flying back to their homeland from the former Soviet republic.
A first special flight with Iraqi refugees on board started on Thursday in Belarus. The plane with the destination Baghdad took off from the airport of the capital Minsk in the afternoon, as the airport announced on its website. Many young people and families with children could be seen in videos of the Belarusian state agency Belta from the check-in hall. For days, thousands of people have been staying at the Belarusian-Polish border in the cold to get to Europe.
According to official data from Iraq, the repatriation of 430 Iraqis who were stranded in Belarus was planned on Thursday.
They should be brought back to Iraq on an evacuation flight, said a foreign ministry spokesman in Baghdad.
According to a report by the state agency INA, employees of the Iraqi consulate had also registered 50 more people in Belarus who wanted to return to Iraq.
Belarus wants to send 5000 people back - if the EU accepts 2000
Belarus is offering the European Union a compromise in view of the plight of the refugees on the border with Poland and the Baltic states.
Minsk is ready to send 5,000 of them back to their home countries, should the EU take in 2,000, the Belta news agency quoted a spokeswoman for President Alexander Lukashenko on Thursday.
He discussed the proposal with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
"The European Union is creating a humanitarian corridor for the 2,000 refugees who are in the camp," said Lukashenko's spokeswoman Natalia Eismont.
"We undertake to make it easier for the remaining 5,000 - as far as possible and desired - to return to their home country."
The EU Commission rejects high-level talks with Belarus about refugees at the EU's external border.
"Negotiations with the Lukashenko regime are out of the question," said the spokesman for EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Eric Mamer, in Brussels.
He expressed himself after a second phone call between Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko on Wednesday.
EU does not recognize Lukashenko's re-election
The EU states do not recognize the re-election of long-time ruler Lukashenko in August 2020, which was overshadowed by accusations of fraud, and had imposed several sanctions.
The Belarusian state news agency Belta reported on Wednesday that Merkel and Lukashenko had agreed in a telephone conversation that the EU and Belarus would "start negotiations immediately".
In order to prevent refugees from being brought to Belarus to be smuggled further into the EU, the European Union recently threatened severe sanctions against foreign airlines as well.
As a result, Turkey, for example, decreed that citizens of several Arab countries are no longer allowed to fly to Belarus from Turkish territory.
According to media reports, Uzbekistan in Central Asia had also announced such a step.
Europe accuses the authoritarian Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko of having brought refugees from crisis regions to Poland's external border in an organized manner in order to put the European Union under pressure and to avenge itself for sanctions.
asc / dpa / AFP