Latvia under migrant pressure closes one of two road border points with Belarus
Closing will free border guards to patrol the “green border” in forests and countryside
Latvia will immediately close one of the last two remaining road traffic border crossing with Belarus, the government announced September 19.
At a press conference following the first regular meeting of Prime Minister Evika Siliņa’s new three-party coalition government, Minister of Interior Rihards Kozlovskis said the road crossing by the Latvian town of Silene will be closed to all traffic, freeing some 50 border guards for duty along the so-called “green border” where there have been daily irregular attempts to enter Latvia by migrants from Belarus.
Only the road crossing by the village of Pāternieki and a specialized railway crossing point will remain open.
Kozlovskis said that attempted crossings by “more than 100 persons” had been a daily occurrence and were supported by the Belarusian authorities, which had helped attempted border crossers to damage or breach border fences and other barriers.
The Latvian State Border Guard reported September 19 that 104 persons had been prevented on the previous from crossing the border from Belarus, for a total of 8608 attempted border crossings so far this year. Four persons were admitted for “humanitarian reasons”
Latvian Border Guards on patrol in a wooded area. Photo: State Border Guard College publicity photo
Asked if Latvia was not seen as a weak point among the European Union countries that Belarus shares borders, the Interior Minister said work on completing a border fence by year’s end was proceeding according to plan and would incorporate “smart technologies” to detect intrusions and violations of the border zone.
Kozlovskis added that “the fence is not a panacea” and said more border guards freed from traveler processing duties at the Silene crossing would improve patrolling the forested and countryside areas where crossing attempts have been made.
In apparent response to increasing pressure on the Belarus-Latvian border, both neighboring Lithuania and Estonia have sent small groups of their border guards to assist Latvia. Of the three Baltic countries, Lithuania, in addition to its border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, has a 680-kilometer border with Belarus, while Estonia’s only land border is with Russia.
Officials in both Latvia and Lithuania have described waves of border crossings and attempted border crossings since 2021 as a form of hybrid warfare by Belarus against its neighbors by luring Third World migrants to fly as tourists to the capital Minsk only to be driven to the Latvian or Lithuanian border to attempt crossing and be pushed back by Belarus border guards or other security forces if they attempted to leave the border area.
In 2021 at one point, there were as many as 4000 migrants housed in various temporary facilities in Lithuania. Most were later repatriated, but not before Lithuania drew some criticism for alleged human rights abuses and ignoring the right to seek asylum.
Some of the most dramatic scenes in the migrant flow through Belarus (encouraged by cheap charter flights from the Middle East) were at the border with Poland, where there were pitched battles between men attempting to breach the border and Polish security forces repelling them with water cannon.