Belarus Is Kicking Up All Kinds of Trouble
If you’re not too busy, let’s talk about Belarus for a minute. A lot of migrants from the Middle East have ended up there, possibly at the connivance of the government. Belarus is trying to push them out, which may have been the plan all along. For its part, Poland has E.U. obligations that prevent it from letting them in, so they’re freezing by the thousands in outdoor refugee camps on the Polish border. From the BBC:
Migrants have described how Belarusian authorities seized their phones and pushed them towards the border fence. Overnight temperatures at the border have slumped below zero and several people have already died in recent weeks. "Nobody is letting us get in anywhere, Belarus or Poland," 33-year-old Shwan Kurd from Iraq told the BBC by video-call. He described how he had arrived in Minsk from Baghdad at the start of November, and was now in a make-shift camp metres from Poland's barbed-wire fence.
"There's no way to escape," he said. "Poland won't let us in. Every night they fly helicopters. They don't let us sleep. We are so hungry. There's no water or food here. There are little children, old men and women, and families.”
Belarus, of course, is ruled by Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian toad who forced an airliner to land so he could grab a dissident, and who sicc’ed his security forces on mass protests against his puppet-show re-election. The Poles think Lukashenko is trying to force an incident on the border in the hopes that an actual shooting conflict will break out. The EU and the United States and NATO all concur.
The head of Poland's national security department, Stanislaw Zaryn, said the migrants were under the control of Belarusian armed units. "Belarus wants to cause a major incident, preferably with shots fired and casualties," deputy foreign minister Piotr Wawrzyk said on Monday. The EU, Nato and the US all say Belarus is orchestrating the problem. Brussels accuses Belarus's disputed leader, Mr Lukashenko, of provoking the influx in retaliation against EU sanctions.
Those sanctions were imposed after Mr Lukashenko's widely discredited re-election in August last year and subsequent crackdown on mass protests.
Addressing parliament on Tuesday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki suggested Russian leader Vladimir Putin - a close ally of Mr Lukashenko - had had a hand in orchestrating the wave of migrants.
Meanwhile, as people are being shoved out of Belarus, some of our homegrown international wandering trash wants to get in. From the Washington Post:
Evan Neumann, who appears to have sat down for an interview with Belarusian state television in a segment titled “Goodbye, America,” is wanted in the United States on charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct on the Capitol grounds, as well as for assaulting, resisting and obstructing law enforcement during civil disorder… Both Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and his close ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin, have frequently referenced the Capitol riot, calling the prosecution of those involved an example of “double standards” by the United States because it frequently criticizes crackdowns on anti-government protests abroad.
Let’s resolve this peacefully through international cooperation. Poland lets in a certain number of refugees from the camps, and we send Belarus an equal number of our January 6 patriots. I mean, in Russian, “Belarus” means “white Russians.” What could possibly be more perfect?
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