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Months after Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko effectively hijacked a plane in order to arrest a Belarusian dissident, and weeks into a crisis in which he is encouraging migrants to cross Belarus’ shared border with the European Union as retaliation for Western sanctions, Brussels still has no plan for how to deescalate tensions with Minsk.
Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte this week described Lukashenko’s decision to send migrants into the bloc as a “tool of hybrid war” against the EU. She stressed the urgency of the situation in a call with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday, saying that nearly 3,000 migrants have been apprehended at the border with Belarus this year, 37 times more than for all of 2020. Sixty percent of them, she says, are coming from Iraq, but there are also many coming from Afghanistan, where the imminent U.S. military withdrawal is causing a panicked exodus.