Belarus crisis: EU wants to sanction the Belavia airline and companies in Turkey and Syria

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Belarusian dictator Lukashenko

Photo: VASILY FEDOSENKO / AFP

The situation on the border between Poland and Belarus has eased somewhat recently, but the EU is maintaining pressure on the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. For example, the EU wants to impose sanctions on the Belarusian state airline Belavia. Various Belarusian officials as well as the Syrian charter airline Cham Airlines and the Turkish passport and visa service provider VIP Grub are also fined. This emerges from a confidential list that the EU Foreign Affairs Representative Josep Borrell sent to the Council of Member States and that is available to SPIEGEL.

In most cases, the sanctions are based on involvement in the transport of migrants to the EU's external border. Belavia, for example, has flown migrants from several Middle Eastern countries - above all from Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey - to Belarus, according to the EU's findings, and thus »contributed to the activities of the Lukashenko regime to enable the illegal crossing of the EU's external borders «.

How this worked can be seen from the reasons for the sanctions against the travel company Oskartour.

The company, based in Minsk, organized visas and flights for migrants from Iraq and worked with Iraqi airlines, Belarusian authorities and the - also listed - state travel company Tsentrkurort.

After the migrants arrived in Belarus, Oskartour arranged for them to be transported to the external EU border.

The sanctions against Belavia were, however, not without controversy among the EU states.

While Poland and the Baltic countries in particular demanded it, according to diplomats, Germany should have stood on the brakes - for fear of embarrassing defeats in court, the airline should keep its promise and discontinue the migrant flights at short notice.

Therefore, according to information from EU circles, the sanctions against the airline are no longer justified with involvement in people smuggling, but also with support for the regime.

Belavia is said to have asked its workforce not to protest against election fraud and mass arrests in the country, according to the EU document: Belavia "benefits from and supports the Lukashenko regime".

A number of high-ranking representatives of the Belarusian government and its security forces are also on the list not only for their involvement in the transport of migrants, but also for violating human rights and supporting the regime.

You will soon have to expect travel and property freezes, among other things.

Large companies are also on the sanction list

Economically painful for Belarus is that large companies such as the fertilizer manufacturer Grodno Azot - which Lukashenko has described as "strategic" according to the EU and which is responsible for "significant revenues" for the regime - and the petrochemical company Belorusneft are also on the list are located.

On Thursday, according to the current planning, the experts of the member countries will deal with the sanctions list again, on Monday it could be approved by the ambassadors.

The final decision could then be made at a ministerial meeting at the end of next week.

Whether Lukashenko will soon stop all attempts to put the EU under further pressure with migrants has by no means been determined. According to the sanctions list, he has already agreed with Russian President Vladimir Putin to open new flight routes for Belavia. Diplomats from the Baltic states are already warning that Lukashenko will open up new transport routes - this time no longer from the Middle East, but from Moscow. His calculation, so the suspicion: Nobody in the EU would dare to sanction Russian airlines.

The left-wing MEP Özlem Demirel sees part of the responsibility for the situation in the EU.

Lukashenko could only blackmail them "because he encountered a wrong policy of isolation from the EU," said Demirel.

"Instead of observing the Geneva Refugee Convention and striving for regular asylum procedures, human rights violations are used as a deterrent." Sanctions are no solution, "as long as the EU does not resolve its own contradictions."