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| Migrants rest under blankets during their stay at the transport and logistics centre Bruzgi on the Belarusian-Polish border in the Grodno region, Belarus November 22, 2021. Leonid Scheglov/BelTA/Handout via REUTERS |
Belarus does not want confrontation with Poland but it does want an answer from the European Union on whether the bloc will accept 2,000 stranded migrants, President Alexander Lukashenko was quoted as saying by the Belta news agency on Monday.
The EU accuses Belarus of flying in thousands of people from the Middle East and pushing them to cross into the EU via Poland, Lithuania and Latvia in response to European sanctions. Minsk denies fomenting the crisis.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki warned on Sunday that the migrant crisis on the Belarus border may be a prelude to โsomething much worseโ, and Polandโs border guard said Belarusian forces were still ferrying migrants to the frontier.
Lukashenko, as quoted by state-owned Belta, said he did not want things to escalate.
โWe need to get through to the Poles, to every Pole, and show them that weโre not barbarians, that we donโt want confrontation. We donโt need it. Because we understand that if we go too far, war is unavoidable,โ he said.
โAnd that will be a catastrophe. We understand this perfectly well. We donโt want any kind of flare-up.โ
Lukashenko also said he insisted Germany take in some migrants and complained that the EU was not making contact with Minsk on the issue.
