Belarus will not protect Europe from illegal migrants, drug trafficking and smuggling under pressure, President Lukashenko said on Tuesday.
“They (the West) cried out today. Oh, the Belarusians are not protecting them. Thousands of illegal migrants have flocked to Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. They are asking us to protect them from smuggling, from drugs. A signal is being heard from the other side of the Atlantic: help in the past, detain nuclear materials so that they do not end up in Europe.
You just want to ask – have you lost your grip there at all? You caused a hybrid war against us and demanded that we protect you as before? “Lukashenko said at a ceremony at the Brest Fortress dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, which was broadcast on Belarus 1 on Tuesday.
“You are suffocating us in terms of information, methodically and collectively. You are undermining, trying to kill our economy and expecting us to spend hundreds of millions of dollars as before to protect your geopolitical interests? You can only think so and count on our support. We are fighting this evil, “If we want us to fight as before, take steps in this direction, not try to strangle us. It is unpromising,” Lukashenko added.
At the end of May, after a sharp international reaction to the forced landing of a Ryanair passenger plane in Minsk, Lukashenko announced that Western countries would now have to control drug smuggling and illegal migration on the border with Belarus. “We stopped drugs and migrants – now you will catch them yourself,” Lukashenko said.
After that, the number of illegal migrants from Belarus, mostly Iraqi citizens, increased sharply in Lithuania.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabriel Landsberg accused Minsk of using refugees as a “hybrid weapon”.
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