The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, deplored the migration crisis created by the Belarusian regime on Friday 3 September, saying that EU member states were ready to take the necessary measures to help Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia deal with the influx of refugees and migrants from Belarus.
“We deplored the fact that Lukashenko’s regime cynically used migrants and refugees to artificially create pressure on our eastern border during the summer”, he said after the informal meeting of Member States’ Foreign Ministers in Kranj, Slovenia. Stressing the solidarity of the Member States with the countries concerned, the High Representative said that they were ready to take all measures to support them if the situation continued.
After the meeting, Latvian Minister Egdars Rinkēvičs announced that he and his Lithuanian and Polish counterparts had called for sanctions against Belarusian companies and individuals involved in using migration in hybrid attacks on the EU’s external border. “The work has started and it must be done as soon as possible”, he added.
The minister thus confirmed the announcement made the day before by the Deputy Director General for the Eastern Partnership at the European External Action Service, Luc Devigne. During a debate in the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, he announced that “work on a fifth set of sanctions was starting with the Member States”.
At the debate, the Polish Ambassador to the EU, Andrzej Sadoś, stressed that “the support of the EU and the Member States is essential to face this threat from Minsk. We need to send a signal, to say that this threat of intimidation does not work”, he warned.
Lithuanian Deputy Foreign Minister Mantas Adomėnas said it was important for the EU to react. He said that other dictatorial regimes were watching the EU’s response and, if it was not adequate, they too could encourage migration flows and hybrid threats to put pressure on the EU.
The parliamentary secretary of the Latvian Foreign Ministry, Zanda Kalniņa-Lukaševica, called for coordination with the United States so that the measures adopted would carry more weight.
Ms Kalniņa-Lukaševica and Mr Adomėnas had also called on the EU to put in place a toolkit to deal with hybrid threats and to strengthen the EU’s resilience to such attacks.
Cooperation with third countries whose nationals are sent to Europe via Belarus was also promoted. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)