--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram for them. We have covered a lot of refugee crises on the show, ones here on the southern border of the United States, Syria, the Rohingya. We recently talked about the Afghans a lot, but we've never covered one like the refugee crisis taking place right now on the border between Belarus and Poland.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: The Polish-Belorussian border is one of EU's external borders to the east. It's a very cold part of the world. So right now, as the winter is approaching, the temperatures fall below zero. And we are talking about a very long border, several hundred kilometers long. And we are mostly talking about woods and fields. And right now we're talking about a war zone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The zone is essentially militarized, it's protected, so no one is allowed in, not even humanitarian workers or aid workers or journalists. The police inform. If you don't follow the workers, phones may be used against you. The security forces are essentially guarding the border. And there is a paramedic team that also works at the border that rescues refugees out of the woods because most of these refugees and migrants suffer from hypothermia right now and also from other conditions that are related to the cold and the thirst and the lack of basic supplies.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: But I would say for the most part, hypothermia is the biggest problem and it's really a humanitarian crisis. So how did this wooded, frozen, almost uninhabitable area between Belarus and Poland essentially become a migrant camp?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Essentially what happened is that thousands of refugees and migrants and asylum seekers flew into Belarus, arrived in Minsk, and then traveled to the border because they have heard that the route to Europe would become available through Belarus, through the Polish-Belorussian border. And for some of them, of course, they wanted to continue to other countries or simply ask for asylum in Poland.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: And so thousands of refugees and migrants and asylum seekers from countries like Syria and Iraq and even Libya had flown into Belarus and ended up stranded at this border. Ten days we've been here without water, temperatures are minus five. And what can we do? Where are the human rights organizations?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were a good country. They invaded Iraq in 2003. We've lost everything. We've sold our cars and sold our houses. They've destroyed our country, and now this is their human rights? How do these largely Iraqi, Syrian, and Yemeni migrants get to Belarus in the first place?
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: What I have heard from the migrants and refugees is that they have seen these, I don't know what to call them, but let's say fake adverts from quote-unquote travel agencies in their respective countries telling them that the route to Europe would become possible, that it's possible to go to Belarus, most of the time on tourist visa without any problems, and that they could just buy a visa and then a plane ticket to Minsk, and then it would be possible for them to access Europe from there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Belarus gave us a visa. We came here to go to Europe. How much did you have to pay for the whole package to come?
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: Two thousand dollars. So once migrants pay thousands of dollars to travel to Belarus, according to reports we're seeing, what happens to them?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So based on my information and on the interviews that I've conducted, most of the time these migrants and refugees would take a car or a taxi. Sometimes, you know, they would get tricked into paying, you know, huge sums of money for the taxi to transport them from Minsk to the border, which is approximately, I think, 200 miles away, something like that.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: Essentially, what is happening is that once the refugees and migrants arrive at the border, it is very hard for them to get either into Poland or even to get back because they are behind a fence and there has been reports and you know this is something that I've seen when I was reporting from Poland is that we know that there are pushbacks by on both sides by both Polish and Belarusian authorities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the night they told us you will go to Poland they cut the fence the Belarusian cut for us and we ran We ran a lot and then we hide ourselves in the forest They see us and return back to the site. It is like a football game. We are in the middle.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: So they are being pushed back by both sides. And as I was saying earlier, there is this emergency zone. So no one, no aid groups or aid professionals or doctors or journalists are allowed in closer to the border. So these refugees and migrants are essentially stranded there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And no one really knows how many people are there exactly. The media report that it could be around 3,000, 4,000 refugees and migrants, including families, including, you know, babies and breastfeeding mothers who are stranded at the border. with no real possibility to kind of move forward either way.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: And with the freezing temperatures, this has become a really, really worrying trend. Attention, attention. All those baby crying for milk, for a nappy. We don't have nothing. Please come and help these people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These migrants and refugees are kind of, you know, camping out or they are sleeping in, you know, sleeping bags, but sometimes they don't even have that. I know that on the Polish side, volunteers have been distributing them blankets and hot tea and even some electric heaters that they could use because of the cold.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: But this is really only the few people who have managed to cross the border. But most of these people don't have anything. They don't have a shelter. And that's why it's so worrying, particularly for small children who can be very vulnerable to hypothermia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I recently interviewed a doctor who was helping on the border from the Polish side. And she described this case where a child was suffering from hypothermia and the mom or the dad, the parents basically had to lie on the child to kind of protect the child from the cold.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: So they were essentially protecting the child with their own body. So this is, you know, the kind of situation. This is how people have to improvise to survive there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So these migrants have been pushed back and forth across the border, and now they're stuck. What happens next? They are facing death because we don't know if they are going to be allowed in. And, you know, the temperatures fall below zero. And for someone who's been there for a long time, obviously they are in a very bad health condition.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: So I don't know if there's any options. Of course, people who have already managed to cross into Poland can ask for asylum, provided that they are not pushed back, because people managed to cross to the Polish side. Oftentimes, they were rescued out of the woods by medical teams or paramedic teams, and then they were taken to the hospital.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then local sources and lawyers told me that we know that there are pushbacks in a way that the Polish border guards wait in front of the hospital so that once the patient is released from hospital, they take him and they push him back towards the border.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: So even when people try and ask for asylum, they can still be pushed back kind of illegally or in non-accordance to humanitarian law and human rights conventions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We know that these people, for the most part, are just stranded there and we don't know what's going to happen to them next. And that's why it's so important to talk about this and, you know, and to use humanizing language and to talk about these human stories above all else, I would say.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: So this man fled Syria due to the war. He was from Aleppo. He tried to approach Europe through the Mediterranean, through Libya. And then he heard that the route to Europe would become possible. Through Belarus, he bought a plane ticket and a visa. And of course, he had no idea that he would end up essentially freezing in the woods.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he's been telling me that he's been there for more than a month now and that he is essentially dying. He's with a group of other migrants. And one of his friends is there with his four children.
--:-- Sarah Sinkirova: And he described that one of the worst things for him was to watch these children die in front of his eyes because they are all freezing there without water and food and they are all injured and sick at this point, stranded in the woods.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Believe it or not, this entire crisis was engineered by Belarus. More on that in a minute on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: It's hard to believe, but Belarus is engineering this migrant crisis? In a word, yes. Beginning this summer, we began to see just all of a sudden dozens of people, hundreds of people coming from the Middle East, predominantly from Iraq, from Syria, from Yemen, coming to the Belarusian border and trying to make their way into Latvia and Lithuania and into Poland now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've heard reports of all of a sudden an unusual proliferation of Belarusian tourist agencies in the Middle East issuing visas to individuals and sometimes group visas. People in these countries are paying their life savings. They're gathering money from friends and family, you know, thousands of dollars for flights to Minsk, the Belarusian capital, for visas in the hopes of making it to the border and making it into the European Union.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: So why is Belarus doing this? Why is President Alexander Lukashenko doing this? He's lashing out. If we remember, in August of 2020, there was presidential elections in Belarus, which are widely believed to have been falsified. And in response, the Belarusian people took to the streets in the tens and hundreds of thousands.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We are here to show that we never elected him and that we want the change, that we want the new country with a new president. And the Belarusian authorities cracked down very brutally, very violently. There's over 800 political prisoners now in Belarus.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: And in response, the European Union imposed sanctions on the regime, as did the United States. One of the weaknesses of the European Union, which is that the EU more broadly, not just these countries on the border, does not have an idea of how to handle yet or respond to migration from people coming from war zones and conflict-torn countries.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so he has been able to exploit one of the bloc's biggest weaknesses. And how does Poland feel about this? They're responding pretty brutally. They've deployed 15,000 troops and border guards to the border with Belarus.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: And they're trying best they can to keep these people in Belarus. And of course, that's received criticism from humanitarian organizations because we don't know. These people, many of them may well have claims to asylum, which they have the right to ask for when they make it across the border.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so far, the Polish authorities are really trying to handle this by themselves. They haven't tried to ask for help from the European Union's border agency Frontex, whereas Lithuania did. But of course, like any good politician, they're also not letting a good crisis go to waste.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: They've used this issue domestically to try and push the message of the ruling Law and Justice Party, which is a very nationalist, very conservative party, which has really made immigration a hot button issue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The chair of the party, Jaroslav Kaczynski, has previously said some very controversial things about migrants and asylum seekers. And so they've capitalized on this as well for their own domestic political gain.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: And Poland probably isn't the final destination for a lot of these migrants. How is the EU responding to what's happening on this border?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, so far on the surface, the EU has really stood by Poland and the Baltic states on this. They're trying to project an image of unity because Europe has a shared problem in responding, not just to this crisis, but the kind of broader issue of having an increasingly rogue dictator backed by Russia on your doorstep.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: So they've tried to project an image of unity. Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, visited the Polish capital last week And he said Poland is facing a serious crisis, which should enjoy the solidarity and the unity of the European Union.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because we need to be firm. What's happening is serious and we need to react firmly. We need to be united. He's even previously spoken about helping Poland fund some kind of structure at the border, be that a wall or a fence.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: Based on an opinion of the legal service of the council, it's legally possible, based on the current legal framework at the European level, to silence infrastructure. So on the surface, there's, you know, there's calls for unity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But of course, I think, you're also beginning to see some tensions around the very robust, shall we say, nature with which Poland is trying to kind of rebuff these people.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: And this comes at a time of broader tensions between Poland and the European Union. Recent domestic decisions made by the Polish authorities, which have been seen as a deeply troubling to the European Union and as a snub to the bloc.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're talking about like Poland passing laws that violate the EU constitution? So one of the top courts in Poland recently passed a law which essentially says the Polish law has supremacy over European Union law.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: And so that really attacks one of the foundational tenets of the European Union, which is that to have the bloc function as a bloc of countries, you have to have some shared laws and that those laws will apply across the bloc.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so people have increasingly become concerned about a so-called poll exit, that Poland will follow the UK and make steps towards leaving the European Union.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: And they've been fined, I think it's something like a million euros per day following this decision. So the European Union has taken it very, very seriously indeed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So all that kind of wider context is bubbling in the background to this current crisis over the border. Okay so needless to say things are complicated between Poland and Belarus and they also complicated between Poland and the EU And the EU is sort of supporting what Poland doing right now on the border but also not
--:-- Amy McKinnon: I think that's something which the EU is grappling with right now, is how can they address this broader crisis? And unlike in 2015, where people were making their way overseas and over land themselves to the European Union.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, this time there's a very natural bottleneck and the people are flying into Belarus. And so that provides an opportunity. We know that Brussels is in dialogue with a lot of the countries where these people are originating from. If you can kind of stem those lines of how people are making their way into Belarus, that could be a way to stem the crisis.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: So that is something that they're looking into just now. And over the weekends, there are some airlines from the region have said that they're going to stop taking people from Syria, Iraq and I think Yemen as well that are flying into Belarus as a way to kind of address the root causes of this problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I mean, in the meantime, there is a dire humanitarian crisis going on at the border of Poland. I mean, there's, I think, a few thousand people estimated to be trapped there right now. Some of them are making it through the fence.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: There's been some reports of local people from these villages kind of setting up these ad hoc groups to try and provide warm clothes, food, shelter, you know, batteries for cell phones that people are using to navigate as and when they find people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But we do know that already, I think eight people are known to have died at the border, but humanitarian agencies say it's likely to be much higher than that. And as the winter gets increasingly colder, unfortunately, I fear they won't be the last.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: What levers can the EU pull to prevent Belarus from continuing to bring in migrants who are, you know, left out to freeze on the border? We'll see what impact it has of these airlines saying that they're going to stop flying in people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not that they're going to stop flying in people, but they're going to stop taking people from certain countries with visas to Belarus that are presumed to be trafficked, essentially, by the Belarusian authorities to the border.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: That may go some way. And of course, the EU, I think this week, is expected to announce further sanctions on the Belarusian authorities. And there's more in their toolkit that they can do there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think there's talk of issuing sanctions against Bolivia, the Belarusian national airline, also Minsk airport. So they have a few more things that they can do.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: But whether or not that's going to make the Belarusian authorities change their mind, you know, they've weathered sanctions before. They can likely weather them again. But there is certainly more options that the EU has at its disposal here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Belarus is the one provoking here. I mean, I'm sure sanctions were an expected outcome for them.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: How much could this continue to escalate? Could this end up being a military conflict between the EU and Belarus, or at least Belarus and Poland? Is it already that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that depends on what happens at the border itself and whether cool heads are able to prevail. You know, we've already seen images of Belarusian border guards using lasers and strobe lights to try and distract the Polish border guards on the other side.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: We've heard certainly reports of blanks being fired. It's an extremely tense situation. I should add that this crisis at the border between Belarus and Poland is of course happening whilst there is a Russian military buildup going on by the borders of Ukraine as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So these two things are often being discussed in conjunction as well. And a lot of questions about what is the Russian role behind the Belarus situation because Belarus is now pretty much wholly dependent on the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: And I think a lot of people are working on the assumption that he wouldn't have tried to start a crisis like this without having at least some kind of wink and a nod ascent from the Kremlin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what's his game plan here? Whose game plan? Sorry. Putin. Crisis in the European Union, crisis in the West. You know, Russian state TV, it's interesting when you watch it, has for years been obsessed with migration in Europe, because I think they recognize that this is an issue which we have not yet, and this will be familiar to many Americans, it's a challenge which we haven't yet found a way to address, which is humane and is humanitarian, but also recognizes the need for countries to have control over their borders.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: And so it's wherever we have those weaknesses in our societies, the Russians and their allies are extremely deft at exploiting them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there a chance that this could backfire on Belarus and all of these migrants that Belarus certainly never wanted in its own country, might just end up staying there?
--:-- Amy McKinnon: They can just deport them. It's Belarus. You know, they're not going to give them due process if they try and apply for asylum. I think it's highly unlikely they're going to give them a fair hearing. It's an authoritarian state ruled by a dictator.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They can just send them back to where they came from. These people that are at the border right now, and there's children among them, are caught between crisis upon crisis upon crisis.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: You know, their countries have been torn apart by war. This opportunity comes along to make it so tantalizingly close to the European Union. And once they get to that border, they find themselves caught in this horrific standoff between a dictator and an alliance of democracies, which has been caught flat-footed by this and being treated very brutally amidst that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's horrendous human tragedy at the center of this broader geopolitical spat.
--:-- Amy McKinnon: Amy McKinnon is a national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our episode today was produced by Halima Shah with help from Amina al-Sadi. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
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