01/04/2022 (Agence Europe) – Europol announced on Friday 1 April that it had deployed teams to Ukraine’s borders with neighbouring countries “to protect the EU and Ukrainian refugees from criminal threats”. At the request of these countries, Europol now has operational teams in Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Moldova, with a forthcoming deployment planned to Hungary, the agency said in a statement. The aim is to support the national authorities with secondary security checks and investigations at Europe’s external borders, in order to identify criminals and ‘terrorists’ trying to enter the EU in the refugee flow and exploit the situation. “These operational teams are also gathering information in the field, which is used to develop criminal threat assessments at the European level and to support investigations”, the statement added. (CG)