Lukashenka turns blind eye to illegal migration, banned substances smuggling to EU through Belarus
On June 22, Alyaksandr Lukashenka accused Western countries of allocating huge financial resources for ‘colour blitzkrieg’ and using hybrid warfare technologies against Belarus.
However, European countries still want Belarus to help in combating illegal migration; recently, they have started ‘grumbling’ over the lack of assistance, the politician noted. According to him, Europeans are ‘insane’ people if they expect that Belarusians will support them.
“They demand that we protect them from smuggling and drug trafficking. Even across the Atlantic we hear the calls for help to detain nuclear materials so that they do not get to Europe. I want to ask them: have you gone crazy there? You are waging a hybrid war against us and demand that we help you as we did before? You are strangling us, systematically and collectively, ruining us, trying to kill our economy and expect us to spend hundreds of millions of US dollars, as before, to protect your geopolitical interests?” Lukashenka said during Tuesday’s ceremony of laying wreaths in Brest Hero Fortress.
Since the beginning of the year, nearly 500 illegal migrants have come to Lithuania through the Belarusian-Lithuanian border, which is six times more than for the whole year of 2020. In mid June, Lithuania’s Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė appealed to the country’s Prosecutor General’s Office, drawing the agency’s attention to the illegal movement of people across the Belarusian-Lithuanian border.
“Migrants from third countries have been crossing the border illegally for several weeks, and we do see the signs indicating that this might be done in an organised way,” she said.
Belarus delivers Syrians and Iraqis from Istanbul and Baghdad to its territory using the national tour operator Tsentrkurort, then so-called ‘tourists’ are taken to the border from Minsk, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis suggested last week. As reported earlier, in response to Western sanctions imposed on the regime, Alyaksandr Lukashenka threatened to loosen control over the flow of migrants at the border with the European Union.
Meanwhile, Lithuania plans to tighten control of state borders to prevent the smuggling of contraband cigarettes from Belarus. According to Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense Laurynas Kasčiūnas, cigarette smuggling is ‘a Belarusian state policy’. In early May, Polish customs officers confiscated another record-large batch of illicit cigarettes from Belarus. It was worth of $2.5 mln.
