A new front has opened in Europe’s standoff with its neighbors over migration.

In recent weeks, Belarus seems to be encouraging migrants to pass through its territory to reach Lithuania, an EU Member State, as retaliation for European economic sanctions placed on Minsk for diverting an airplane to arrest an onboard dissident journalist in May. President Alexander Lukashenko has said his country is halting migration cooperation with the European Union and refusing to close its borders.

Lithuanian officials have claimed Belarus is flying in migrants and sending them to Lithuania.

“It seems like the Belarusian authorities now facilitate irregular migration possibly in retaliation to EU restrictive measures and as a response to the Lithuanian support for the civil society in Belarus," Ylva Johansson, European Commissioner for Home Affairs, said this week.

More than 1,500 illegal crossings of the Lithuania-Belarus border have been registered so far in 2021, a nearly 20-fold increase over the 81 crossings in all of 2020. Many of the migrants are Iraqi citizens, but there are also significant numbers from Syria, Iran, and Central and Western Africa.

In response, Lithuania has declared a state of emergency and started building a 340-mile (550-kilometer) barbed wire fence along the border.

While the particulars of this situation are unique, the general dynamics will ring familiar to followers of migration to the European Union. Just a few weeks ago, European officials accused Morocco of again using migrants’ access to Spanish enclaves as leverage for larger political maneuvering. Last year, the major antagonist was Turkey, which opened its border to migrants heading to Greece and Bulgaria.

The recent moves by Belarus are a further sign that politicians at Europe’s periphery believe migrants are a valuable cudgel to use against their neighbors—for leverage or punishment.

It also shows the challenges of the so-called Fortress Europe approach of externalizing borders. Once nearby countries realize that Europe is prepared to pay a major price to bottle up migrants, they may continue pushing to see just how high that price will go.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made these factors all the more acute. With economies harmed by months of lockdown, Europe would likely resist accommodating large numbers of asylum seekers and other migrants.

Caught in the middle are the migrants themselves, who have been called pawns in a larger dispute. New reception centers have been hastily constructed along the Lithuanian border to accommodate arrivals, but legal and medical staff have been overwhelmed. Whatever the result of the current tension between Lithuania and Belarus, migrants' individual stories are likely to fall victim to broader geopolitical gamesmanship.

Best regards,
Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
[email protected]