Hundreds of migrants camped out near the Belarusian border with Poland in freezing overnight temperatures, as Polish authorities braced on Tuesday for further clashes with people attempting to breach the frontier.
Thousands had converged near the Polish border on Monday, some of them using logs, spades and other implements to try to break down a border fence, escalating a months-long crisis that has prompted calls for tighter Western sanctions on Minsk.
Poland and other European Union member states accuse Belarus of encouraging illegal migrants from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa to cross the border into the EU in revenge for sanctions slapped on Minsk over human rights abuses.
“The Belarusian regime is attacking the Polish border, the EU, in an unparalleled manner,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told a news conference in Warsaw.
“We currently have a camp of migrants who are blocked from the Belarusian side. There are about 1,000 people there, mostly young men. These are aggressive actions that we must repel, fulfilling our obligations as a member of the European Union.”
A spokesman for Poland’s special services, Stanislaw Zaryn, said Belarusian security personnel were firing empty shots into the air, simulating dangerous events to further destabilize the situation at the border.
We also know the Belarusian authorities are helping migrants to destroy the border barriers. We see how they bring them tools to cut wires to destroy the fence, he added.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s government, which is backed by Russia, denies manufacturing the migrant crisis and blames Europe and the United States for the plight of the people stranded at the border.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki visited the area early on Tuesday to show support for the thousands of additional soldiers, police and border guards deployed there.
Footage published by the Polish police on Tuesday showed migrants’ tents and campfires on the Belarusian side of the barbed wire fence. Poland’s Border Guard said it had registered 309 attempts to cross the border illegally on Monday and 17 people, mainly Iraqis, had been detained.
Around 800 people are currently camped out on the Belarusian side of the fence, the Border Guard told. Poland’s special services said as many as 12,000 migrants may currently be in Belarus.
Polish authorities shut an official border crossing with Belarus at 0600 GMT on Tuesday near where thousands of migrants had tried to push through the day before.
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