BELARUS/POLAND: Human collateral

Belarus's despotic leader has created a migrant crisis to goad the EU. But what happens next may be at the whim of Vladimir Putin

- Andrew Roth

Gunshots echo through the forest as Belarusian soldiers fire warning shots to drive back terrified asylum-seekers from Iraq and Syria. Along the border, Polish and Belarusian troops eye each other warily through razor wire fence. At night, Polish guards say they've been blinded by Belarusians wielding strobe lights and lasers as migrants sneak across.

Asylum seekers last week described hellish conditions in the forests and at improvised campsites, where they chop branches for firewood and ration water to survive. The body of a young Syrian man was found in the forest in Poland last Friday, at least the ninth person to have died this year. Others have been beaten by attackers and thieves waiting in the forest.

This is the chaos on Europe's eastern border in 2021. In the past year, Alexander Lukashenko, the autocratic leader of Belarus, has gone from nuisance, to international pariah, to nemesis. His greatest gambit yet has been to engineer a new migrant crisis on the borders of the EU, utilising the desperation of thousands of people to take revenge on Brussels for sanctions against his regime.

He believes that by escalating this crisis to the point of a humanitarian catastrophe, he can force the EU to the table, and has even threatened that his ally Russia could be drawn in.

"He is not afraid of deaths at the border," said a panel of experts from the European Council on Foreign Relations last week. “For him, this is about vengeance and is a matter of regime survival - meaning that he is ready to escalate further, and to seek Russia's backing in the process.” Lukashenko's top backer seems to have balked at his most aggressive threats. Last weekend, Vladimir Putin said that Lukashenko was speaking out of turn when he threatened to cut Russian gas deliveries to Europe.