- Belarusian border guards said the temporary camp for migrants along the Belarusian-Polish border at the Koznica Proszy crossing has been evacuated.
- A spokeswoman for the authority said the migrants would no longer be allowed to enter the green strip along the Polish border fortifications.
- The migrants are now housed in a nearby logistics center.
- After the first case of Covid was reported at the emergency center the day before, the vaccination center is scheduled to start operating there on Friday. A Chinese vaccine is planned.
In the morning, the Belarusian state media again published videos from the logistic hall, which now houses all the people who previously camped in the forest. In the emergency shelter, adults and children were huddled on mattresses on the floor. Accordingly, food was distributed in front of the building.
The unstable humanitarian situation
Because many of the drowned and frozen people sought refuge there, a second floor was also made available for immigrants.
Children’s and human rights organizations have appealed to the EU Commission to protect the rights of migrants at the EU’s external borders. 27 organizations have said that people in the border region with Belarus should be evacuated immediately and given access to the constitutional asylum procedure, according to a message from Pro Asyl in Berlin to mark International Children’s Rights Day on November 20.
They also demanded immediate access to the border area for humanitarian organizations to be able to take care of those in need there.
Putin talks to Lukashenko
Governor Alexander Lukashenko called Russian President Vladimir Putin again. The Moscow Kremlin announced that it was also about a phone call that Lukashenko had with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The chancellor spoke to Lukashenko twice this week to urge an improvement in the humanitarian situation for migrants at the Belarus-Polish border.
Putin and Lukashenko criticized the actions of the Polish security forces against migrants, calling them “unacceptable and brutal”. Brute force was used. The Polish side used water cannons on Tuesday to prevent migrants from crossing the secured border into the European Union.
Fewer border crossings into Poland were registered
Meanwhile, far fewer attempts to cross the border by migrants from Belarus were recorded in Poland than in previous days. Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said there were still unilateral attempts to reach Poland and thus join the European Union on Friday night. These groups are much smaller than they were in the past few days, when about a hundred migrants tried to get through the border fence at once. This appears to confirm a change of course by the government in Minsk during the migration crisis.
The Polish government and the European Union accuse authoritarian Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko of targeting people from crisis regions in order to smuggle them into the European Union. Polish border guards recorded 255 attempts by migrants to illegally cross the external borders of the European Union on Thursday. The authority announced on Twitter that among them were two groups larger than 500 and 50 immigrants.
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