The EU could build a border wall on the bloc’s frontier with Belarus to keep migrants out, it has emerged.
For senior EU officials, it would represent a significant U-turn. They had previously criticized Viktor Orban (Hungarian Prime Minister) and Donald Trump (US President).
Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader has been accused by the media of deliberately flying would-be refugees across the border from North Africa and the Middle East to be used as a weapon against migration.
The EU could build a border wall on the bloc’s frontier with Belarus to keep migrants out. Pictured: Migrants are seen at a tent camp on the Belarusian-Polish border. The Polish Border Guard reports that several thousand migrants are approaching Poland’s border every day since November 8th, 2021.
Russia dispatched two nuke-capable aircraft to be in Belarusian airspace, as tensions increased. At a commemoration of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Charles Michel, President of the European Council, stated that Brussels would help to build a barrier to stop asylum seekers from entering.
‘We have opened the debate on the EU financing of physical border infrastructure,’ he told a stunned audience today in the German capital, which was divided for nearly three decades. ‘This must be settled rapidly.’
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, only last month insisted ‘there will be no funding of barbed wire and walls’.
Mr Lukashenko, dubbed Europe’s last dictator, denies orchestrating what Mr Michel called a ‘brutal, hybrid attack’ on the EU.
Warsaw estimated that around 4,000 migrants have been reported to be living along the Belarusian-Polish border. Russian media reported that most migrants want to travel to Britain. However, Polish officials claimed that most people who crossed the border want to seek asylum in Germany and/or the Netherlands.
Poland’s defence ministry released a video allegedly showing a Belarusian soldier firing a shot into the air to intimidate migrants as more tried to cross at night.
The shot was fired and it shows the crowd screaming.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to ‘exert his influence on the regime in Minsk’. Belarus was a Soviet country.
Pawel Jablonski, a deputy Polish foreign minister, told the Daily Mail that Mr Putin and Mr Lukashenko wanted to ‘destabilise the EU as a whole’. He accused Mr Lukashenko of ‘seeking revenge’ for EU sanctions imposed on 166 individuals tied to the Belarusian regime last year.
Alexander Lukashenko from Belarus (pictured) was accused of weaponizing migration by flying would-be refugees in deliberately from the Middle East, North Africa, and then sending them across the border to Poland.
The measures were brought in after Mr Lukashenko’s crackdown on opponents following disputed elections in 2020.
EU ambassadors today agreed to broaden sanctions against Belarus for what Poland said was ‘state terrorism’, to include another 30 individuals and entities. They will have their assets frozen, and the individuals added to a blacklist for travel.
Russia sent two strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons to Belarus yesterday in support of its ally.
The UN warned the EU not to ‘enter a race to the bottom’. UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, said: ‘These challenges simply do not justify the knee-jerk reaction we have seen in some places – the irresponsible xenophobic discourse, the walls and barbed wire, the violent push-backs that include the beating of refugees and migrants.’