Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
“Poland, Lithuania and Latvia are considering asking NATO to hold emergency talks as they struggle to manage a tense migration standoff on their borders with Belarus, the Polish prime minister said Sunday… The authoritarian Belarusian regime in Minsk has for months been orchestrating a flow of migrants across its border into the three European Union nations, which form the eastern flank of both the 27-nation EU and NATO… Many migrants are now stuck in makeshift camps in freezing weather as Poland has reinforced its border with 15,000 soldiers in addition to border guards and police.” AP News
Both sides condemn the Belarusian regime and call for sanctions:
“The sanctions should come hard and swift. The United States ought to press Iraq and other nations in the Middle East to cut off flights to Minsk. Poland and Lithuania should allow humanitarian relief as needed for the unfortunate victims huddled along the border fence, but these countries must remain steadfast against Mr. Lukashenko’s thuggery. His departure from office and free and fair elections are the only hope for a new start in Belarus.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“First, the United States should pressure the EU to introduce new sanctions on Belarus. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called for the enacting of preset EU sanctions on Belarus. The EU should also consider sanctions on third-party airlines that bring the refugees to Belarus to be used in this manner. But these actions are unlikely to proceed unless the U.S. leverages its EU member state relationships in favor of Poland. The U.S. should then push for further action…
“Recognizing Putin's central role in this humanitarian crisis, the Biden administration should also prepare sanctions targeting Russian commodity exporters to Belarus. This tactic would serve a double purpose of imposing costs on Lukashenko's fragile regime while also hitting the fragile Russian economy… The only way this situation is going to end positively is if Putin and Lukashenko feel pain for what they are doing. Otherwise, they will simply continue ruining human lives in order to hurt the West.”
Editorial Board, Washington Examiner
Other opinions below.
“Russia is controlling the marionette here. Mr. Lukashenko once played Russia and the West off each other, but since the popular protests against him he has thrown in completely with Moscow. Mr. Putin is taking advantage, flying Russian strategic bombers over Belarusian airspace this week. The Kremlin has called on Europe to pay Minsk to halt the migrants while blaming Western intervention in the Middle East for the chaos. This trolling is Mr. Putin’s specialty: Create or encourage a crisis, blame the victim, and demand concessions to resolve the issue…
“The larger strategic context is that Mr. Putin and his crony believe they can act with relative impunity because Europe is desperate for Russian gas amid an energy crunch…
“The best near-term approach is to impose harsher sanctions on items like potash exports and to pressure Middle Eastern countries to halt flights into Minsk. In the long run, Europe will have to lessen its dependence on Russian energy. Killing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would be an important start, if anyone has the nerve.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Lukashenko might very well get away with this attempt to drive a further wedge between Poland and Lithuania and their Western partners. He did, after all, get away with an earlier instance of use of force against the EU—in May, when his regime used a fighter jet to hijack a Ryanair flight between Athens and Vilnius in order to abduct a Belarusian citizen on board, a critic of the regime. The EU’s reaction was minimalistic, calling for an ‘international investigation’ and promising to eventually deploy additional sanctions…
“Short of an actual shooting war, it is hard to imagine a more clear-cut case of using hard power against other countries than what Lukashenko and his Russian sponsor have been doing lately… NATO members ought to be talking about deploying military assets on the Lithuanian and Polish borders to dissuade Lukashenko and Putin from any further shenanigans…
“Effective deterrence has to be disproportionate… From Vladimir Putin’s perspective, facing another round of economic [sanctions] is trivial compared to, say, a 5 percent chance of peeling Poland off the EU and Western alliance. To make his or Lukashenko’s regime hurt is neither easy nor costless for the West. Yet, unless effective deterrence is restored, the West might sleepwalk into a real conflict more easily than most of us would like to imagine.”
Dalibor Rohac, The Bulwark
“Poland is giving the impression that the country's security is in acute danger. The president has even spoken to NATO, as if his country were being hounded by Ghengis Khan and his Mongolian horsemen. But the commotion in Warsaw is mainly propaganda. We're talking about a few thousand refugees who have followed the ratcatcher methods of the Belarusian government. And they are now supposed to pose a threat to 40 million Poles?…
“The EU, for its part, should stop its blind declarations of solidarity with Poland and put pressure on the government to work immediately on a humane solution for the people on the border, perhaps with the help of international organizations. The rest is a matter of negotiation with the refugees' countries of origin and transit countries as well with Russia and Belarus. It is urgent because winter is approaching and could lead to more deaths on the border.”
Barbara Wesel, DW
“From a humanitarian and financial point of view, Europe, and Germany in particular, could take in all those poor frozen souls from the Polish border. Its politicians just don’t want to… Yet the instinct to put up barbed wire, send troops and intensify pushbacks is fruitless because these ‘solutions’ are unsustainable…
“With 86% of the world’s 26.4 million refugees living in developing countries and 27% in the least developed ones, according to the United Nations, Europe cannot hold out forever against this overhang of desperation without turning itself into an impregnable fortress… It’s finally time not just for Europe but for the entire Western world to start working on lasting solutions to the refugee crisis.”
Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg
“[An] important part of the answer might lie in speeding up and expanding the legal processing of migrants. In fact, many of the people who make it to Germany will have their cases examined, will be found not to merit asylum, and will then be sent back. This procedure will take a couple of months, which sounds like a lot unless you remember that similar procedures on the U.S.-Mexico border can take several years…
“What if an emergency system were created to make that process happen even faster? Those people who genuinely qualify for refugee status or deserve some kind of special consideration could then stay, while the rest would be sent home. The sight of large airplanes carrying people back to Erbil from Warsaw might finally persuade others not to come.”
Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic
