The Prime Minister of Lithuania stated that she believes that Belarus is behind the recent surge in illegal immigration into Lithuania, after the Lithuanian President threatened that Belarus would no longer prevent immigrants from crossing its western border.
The President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, issued a statement in Parliament on May 26 in response to EU sanctions that forced a Ryanair plane carrying Belarusian dissidents to land in the country. Minsk did it after being arrested there.
“No […] As we have seen on other borders of the European Union, this is only an episode of illegal immigration.” Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte (Ingrida Simonyte) was speaking in the vicinity of Dubusia on Tuesday (June 15). Said that the site is close to the sparsely populated and forested border with Belarus.
“Mr. Lukashenko threatened the European Union, saying it would be flooded with drugs and immigration, and now we are starting-in a few weeks, we have seen a rapid increase in the number of illegal border crossings.”
The press office of the President of Belarus did not respond to requests for comment.
Since June 3, Lithuania has detained 198 migrants who arrived through its 679-kilometer border with Belarus, and the number of people detained in the past 12 days is the same as in the previous five months.
From 2017 to 2020, the country will accept no more than 90 immigrants each year.
After a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania was forced to land in the Belarusian capital on May 23, European airlines were told to fly near Belarus and their national airlines were banned from flying across the European Union.
Lukashenko told EU countries: “We used to catch migrants here in droves – now, forget it, you will catch them yourself.”
The imprisoned dissident journalist Roman Protasevich (Roman Protasevich) appeared at a press conference in Minsk on Monday, saying that he felt good and had not been beaten. The opposition said it was another time to make it public under duress. Show up.
On Tuesday, in the pine forest of the immigration processing center in Lukla, Lithuania, dozens of large heated tents were empty. The tents were built by the army over the weekend to create space for an additional 350 people and when new immigrants arrived. Three times the capacity of the center.
Most of the immigrants came from Iraq, but they also came from Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Egypt.
