In the drama about thousands of refugees on the border between Poland and Belarus, the incumbent Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) calls for ranks against ruler Alexandr Lukashenko in Minsk. "The Poles are doing an important service here for all of Europe," Seehofer told the Funke media group on Friday. Therefore, the Polish government must be helped to secure the external border, and all EU states must stand together. "We now have to rely on the whole democratic world public supporting our politics," said the CSU politician.
Lukashenko's approach of taking migrants from the Middle East to Belarus and then on to the Polish border by scheduled flight is a “very nasty political method” that must be stopped.
"We call this a hybrid threat, where people are used to destabilize the EU and especially Germany - this must not be allowed to prevail in the world."
West condemns "orchestrated instrumentalization of people"
At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, the US and the European members of the body condemned the “orchestrated instrumentalization of people” by the government in Minsk. The aim of the ruler Lukashenko's action is to “destabilize the external border of the European Union”, it said in a joint statement after the closed session on Thursday in New York. The statement, which was also followed by Norway and the UK, said Belarus’s aim is also to "divert attention from its own growing human rights abuses".
The emergency meeting called by Estonia, France and Ireland lasted a little over half an hour.
The declaration made no mention of Russia, which has supported Belarus since the beginning of the crisis.
Before the meeting, the Russian ambassador to the UN, Dmitri Polyansky, had denied allegations made by the West and assured that Moscow was not involved in sending migrants to the border with Poland.
The EU accuses Lukashenko of deliberately smuggling migrants to the borders of the EU countries Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in retaliation for sanctions.
In the Belarusian-Polish border area, thousands of people, especially from the Middle East, are currently stuck in freezing temperatures.