Poland not to blame for migrant deaths at Belarus border – Polish official

February 28, BPN. Polish authorities treat migrant death reports at the shared border with Belarus as a part of Alaksandr Łukašenka’s and Vladimir Putin’s hybrid war, Polish Deputy Interior Minister Maciej Wąsik told Polskie Radio Program 3.

Poland cannot be responsible for the fact that migrants are shipped from Moscow and Minsk and pushed into Poland, he stressed.

Migrants are severely beaten on the Belarusian side of the border so that they don’t want to come back, the official noted. Before turning migrants away, Polish border guards provide them with necessary help, food and clothes and take them to hospitals if needed, he said.

Poland cannot just open the European Union’s border to anyone and is doing everything to prevent a new migrant crisis that Putin and Łukašenka are trying to engineer, Wąsik noted.

Belarusian authorities reportedly recorded a total of eight deaths of migrants since the start of 2023.

The migration crisis at the Belarusian-EU border dates back to the spring of 2021. It escalated in November 2021 when thousands of migrants set up a camp in Belarus near the Polish border. The Baltic states and Poland accused Belarusian authorities of creating the trouble, while the latter blamed it on the West.

Migration figures had dropped significantly by the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, but have risen more recently.