On September 10, Foreign Policy published a biweekly column featuring Scowcroft Center deputy director Matthew Kroenig and New American Engagement Initiative senior fellow Emma Ashford discussing the latest news in international affairs.
In this column, they discuss Belarus’ attempt to inundate Eastern Europe with migrants, threats to democracy in Brazil, and the newly announced Taliban government in Afghanistan.
The regime in Minsk, determined to push back on the European Union for supporting pro-democracy activists and imposing sanctions on his regime, is encouraging migrants from countries like Iraq to come visit the country. Once there, Belarus helps them to cross the border into EU member states such as Lithuania and Poland.
Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenko understood that refugee flows, such as those that resulted from the Syrian civil war, destabilized Europe, so what better way to retaliate against the EU than to purposely unleash a flood of migrants into EU countries?
