Dexter Filkins
For centuries, national leaders have sought new and better weapons to bend adversaries to their will. On November 8th, when border guards in Belarus led hundreds of Middle Eastern migrants to the Polish border at Kuźnica-Bruzgi and directed them to cross, they were introducing an especially novel type of armament to the history of warfare: immigration.
The government of Belarus, led by a man often referred to as Europe’s last dictator, Alexander Lukashenka, has been hampered by international sanctions since the summer of 2020, when he crushed a nationwide revolt against his flagrantly fraudulent Presidential-election victory. The sanctions, imposed by the European Union, the United States, and others, are biting hard. In June, Lukashenka began offering unfettered passage for Middle Easterners into Europe—first to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, and then, often by government bus, to the borders of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, all E.U. members. “It’s being orchestrated by Lukashenka,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, told me in a recent interview.
Lukashenka’s aim, Landsbergis said, was to force the E.U. to ease its sanctions against Belarus, at the threat of an immigration flood tide. Whatever else Lukashenka’s scheme is, it’s ingenious: the broken countries of the Middle East and Central Asia are filled with young men and women looking for better lives, and the doors to Europe are otherwise locked tight. In some cases, migrants have paid between five thousand and fifteen thousand dollars to come to Belarus, meaning, in all likelihood, that people inside Lukashenka’s regime are almost certainly profiting from the project. Others, apparently, came with minimal expense—they were given visas by the Belarusian Consulate in Baghdad or Erbil.
Lukashenka has publicly denied that he is enabling an immigration pipeline to flow into Europe, but his denials aren’t credible—not when Iraqi migrants are showing up in Poland with wire cutters that they say were given to them by Belarusian security forces. Lukashenka is not the first national leader to use the threat of unrestrained immigration for political purposes—he’s just the first to actually make good on the promise. For years, Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, Turkey’s President, has threatened to allow free passage for the Syrian refugees inside his country, who number 3.6 million. The E.U. has responded with large tranches of financial aid to help pay for the immigrants, and it has mostly stood by as Erdoǧan has slowly dismantled Turkish democracy. Erdoǧan has Europe right where he wants it.
To stop the migrants, the governments of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland have deployed troops to their borders with Belarus, and they have deported many if not most of those who have made it across. Still, the troop deployments and other measures—including, as in Lithuania, the construction of migrant camps—are expensive, and they raise the question: What can be done?
This week, under pressure from the E.U., the airline Belavia said that it would stop allowing Iraqis, Syrians, and Yemenis to board its flights in Turkey, and the Turkish government said that it would stop selling tickets to Belarus to citizens of those countries. Iraqi Airways stopped flying to Minsk over the summer and said this week that it would not resume flights there.
But Belavia flies throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, regions that have droves of eager young people who want to go to Europe. And, according to Landsbergis, thousands of Iraqis and others have already arrived in Belarus, waiting to cross. The migrants themselves face an especially harrowing journey: when they approach the border of any one of the E.U. states, they are pushed back, but the government of Belarus doesn’t want them, either. Thousands of migrants appear to be stuck in what is literally no man’s land—on the border, between two countries, unable to move forward or back.
The key to the crisis—the key to Belarus—lies in Russia. President Vladimir Putin is Lukashenka’s benefactor and guarantor. For years, the Russian government has provided the Lukashenka government with billions of dollars’ worth of subsidized gas and oil, which it can sell at market prices elsewhere. These subsidized fuels are crucial in sustaining Moscow’s satrapy in Minsk. Last year, during the popular uprising against Lukashenka, Putin made it clear that he would, if necessary, use force to keep Belarus from slipping out of the Russian orbit.
In this way, the immigration crisis unfolding in Europe is a battle between Russia and the West, with Belarus the place where it is being fought. And the battle is not just in Belarus: all along Europe’s borders, the former states of the Soviet Union have become arenas of East-West competition. In Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, overwhelming popular aspirations to move closer to Europe are running up against the hard calculations of Russian power.
In October, the Russian military began large troop movements on the Ukrainian border, which has raised fears of a second Russian invasion; in 2014, Russian forces occupied the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbas region, in southeastern Ukraine. Last week, the C.I.A. director, Bill Burns, travelled to Moscow, in part to warn his Russian counterparts against making any new moves into Ukraine. For now, it appears that the Russian military is not preparing for an imminent push across the border, according to the Institute for the Study of War, in Washington, D.C., which monitors the Russian military. “We think it’s for intimidation purposes,’’ Mason Clark, the lead Russia analyst at the I.S.W., told me.
Clark said that the Russian troops were redeployed earlier this year from a base near Kazakhstan, and that they appear to be preparing for a long stay. In other words, Putin has decided to shift military resources closer to the borders of the Soviet Union’s former European republics.
If the threat of an invasion of Ukraine is not immediate, the hybrid war in Eastern Europe hardly seems likely to end. Until circumstances in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan improve, legions of young men and women will be eager to risk hardship, arrest, or even death to make it to Europe. Climate change threatens to increase the flow of migrants in the years ahead. Lukashenka won’t hold on to Belarus forever, but, as the events on the Polish and Lithuanian borders show, he may have invented a weapon that will be with us for a long time to come.
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