According to the government in Vilnius, Belarusian border guards entered Lithuanian territory to drive 35 migrants across the border with neighboring Lithuania. “We cannot tolerate such a brazen provocation that twelve border guards crossed the border into Lithuania today,” Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite said on Tuesday. The guards, equipped with shields and protective equipment, accordingly crossed the border in the Salcininkai region.
The Lithuanian border authorities published a video of the incident on online networks. It said that Belarus had also published a video of it, but did not show that the migrants had been pushed across the border.
According to the EU, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko is using migrants to retaliate for Western sanctions against his country.
According to EU data, more than 4000 migrants have been registered since the beginning of the year, who entered Lithuania “irregularly” across the border from Belarus. Nearly 2,800 of the people were from Iraq. In the whole of 2020, only 81 illegal migrants had been registered at the Belarusian-Lithuanian border.
