Belarus: Hundreds of migrants continue to hope that the border will be opened

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Refugees in the »Bruzgi« logistics center on the border with Poland (photo taken on December 1st)

Photo: Oksana Manchuk / AP

Hundreds of people seeking protection are still waiting in Belarus on the border with Poland.

"We are still 900 to 1000, including many children," said the 25-year-old Iraqi Gaschtjar in the emergency shelter in a logistics center in Brusgi the German press agency on Monday.

The trained nurse, who speaks German, hopes that the new federal government will make progress in the migration crisis even after Chancellor Olaf Scholz's visit to Poland on Sunday.

However, the EU and Germany have so far not given the prospect of this.

Since the summer, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has flown thousands of people from crisis regions into Minsk and driven them to the border with Poland.

Lukashenko wants to take revenge for the sanctions that the West imposed after Lukashenko hijacked a Ryanair plane.

3,000 migrants returned to their homeland

Lukashenko complained in Minsk that the EU had not done anything on the issue of migrants for weeks.

He had phoned Angela Merkel twice.

He then claimed that Germany was ready to take in some of the migrants.

In Berlin, however, this was immediately denied.

more on the subject

• Access to asylum procedures: Europe is about to abolish refugee protectionA comment by Steffen Lüdke

• Crisis on the Belarusian border: "The Polish pushbacks are illegal" An interview by Steffen Lüdke

• Refugees in Belarus: »Deportation or back to the border« By Christina Hebel, Moscow

In the past few weeks, more than 3,000 migrants have left Belarus for Iraq or Syria.

Lukashenko claimed in an interview with the Turkish state television broadcaster TRT that these were voluntary returnees.

Lukashenko emphasized that nobody was forced.

“We do everything the way they want it.

They are starving, poor people fleeing war.

They really have no home in their homeland. "

In the interview, Lukashenko threatened again to stop gas transit through the Russian-European Yamal pipeline if the sanction pressure on the country became too high.

The quantities flowing through this pipeline are comparatively small for the gas market in the EU.

Nevertheless, the Kremlin in Moscow reacted promptly and said that Russia wanted to remain a reliable supplier of energy.

slü / dpa