Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko has weaponised migration, with thousands of asylum-seekers and migrants from the Middle East caught up in a multilayered geopolitical standoff with neighbours such as Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

As tensions escalate between Belarus and the West in the wake of fraudulent presidential elections last year and a violent crackdown on protests, Lukashenko has sought to exploit the European Union’s weak seams of unresolved internal tensions over migration and Poland’s increasing defiance of Brussels by shipping in would-be migrants and then flooding them toward his European neighbours’ borders.

Foreign Policy