
Around 1,000 illegal migrants may be concentrated on Lithuania’s border with Belarus, says the Minister of National Defence, lrytas.lt writes.
“In any case, according to our data, the number of migrants on the Lithuanian border is already around 1,000 and a bit more,” Arvydas Anušauskas told LRT on Wednesday.
“How will this group will be used? I could guess that (…) they will be pushed into Lithuania in larger or smaller groups, but that does not change the essence of the situation, because the policy of non-admission is still valid for any group, and we have the capacity to do so,” he said.
According to the Minister, the arrival of migrants in Belarus has increased in recent months.
A. Anušauskas predicted that the regime of Aliaksandr Lukashenko is trying to create a humanitarian crisis on the European Union (EU) border.
“My prediction is that judging by the fact that they are ‘cleansing’ their cities of illegals, who used to walk quite freely in Minsk and Grodno, they will push them to the border, they will set up camps, they will create an artificial humanitarian crisis, and they will present all of this to the international community as an EU problem, not an artificially created problem,” the minister said.
Since Monday, several thousand irregular migrants have been massing on the Polish border from the Belarusian side. They have set up camp there and are trying to break through the border.
Rustam Liubaev, head of the Lithuanian State Border Guard Service, told journalists on Wednesday that officers are monitoring the movement of irregular migrants on the Lithuanian border as well, and that they may be transported by lorries.
Due to the events at the border, a state of emergency has been imposed on Lithuania’s border with Belarus since Wednesday.
More than 4,200 migrants have entered Lithuania illegally this year and over 6,000 have been refused entry.
Lithuania and other Western countries accuse the Minsk regime of organising the migrant flows and call it hybrid aggression.

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