The tension continues in the border between Belarus and Poland, where thousands of migrants remain trapped in freezing conditions. Images from this Friday night show how Belarusian troops tried to tear down the wall made by the Polish government.
For the refugees waiting on the other side, “If you go in there you can’t go back”, according to the Polish journalist and activist Karol Wilczyński. “These people are literally forced to stay there, in camps built by the Belarusian military,” he says. Wilczyński gives the example of a Yemeni family he met at the border, formed by a married couple with three children: “They begged me on their knees ‘please let us go back to Yemen’“, he reports.
Thousands of people crowd at the border crossing of Kuznika. Daniel Gil, political scientist and international analyst, explains that “from the Russian region of Kaliningrad to Belarus there is a strip of territory of approximately 90 kilometers that is European territory”: the border between Poland and Lithuania, known as the suwalki runner, that today Aleksandr Lukashenko destabilizes with this migratory crisis.
However, for analysts this situation has interests far beyond. “Russia already controls Kaliningrad, if it controlled or had a military presence on the Belarusian border, I would have a position with which to pressure NATO“, Gil points out.
Although the Russian president, Vladimir Putin denies taking part In this crisis, experts believe that Moscow is interested in Belarus remaining as a “buffer zone”, according to Mira Milosevich, principal investigator at the Elcano Royal Institute. In other words, a security or ‘buffer’ zone that protects its borders.
For that, Putin needs Lukashenko, despite the fact that the relationship between the two, according to Milosevich, “has never been good.” But the Belarusian president also needs Putin: in this sense, Fernando Arancón, director of ‘El Orden Mundial’, points out that “while Russia often goes into crisis and saves him, Russia does get concessionsThe latter would translate into the installation of missiles in the Belarusian city of Grodno, near the Suwalki corridor.
Mario Twitchell is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his insightful and thought-provoking writing on a wide range of topics including general and opinion. He currently works as a writer at 247 news agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
