Over the past month, as thousands of migrants gathered on Belarus’s border with Poland and tried to cross into the European Union, some European leaders accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of engaging in a “hybrid war.” In an effort to put pressure on the EU, they asserted, Lukashenko intentionally sent the migrants to the border with Poland and left them exposed in a freezing forest. Ylva Johansson, the European commissioner for home affairs, called it a new way of “using human beings in an act of aggression.” But if the strategy was extreme, the forces driving it have long been in play. What EU leaders failed to acknowledge was that Lukashenko was drawing on a dynamic of state-manipulated migration that has become common in many parts of the world—and which the EU itself has helped shape.
Without a doubt, the Poland-Belarus crisis has been exceptionally sordid. The migrants in question were not from Belarus or even from surrounding countries but largely from Iraq and Kurdistan. Starting in June, they had been lured to Belarus on tourist visas, with the false promise that they would then have easy access to the EU. When they arrived in Minsk, they were bused straight to the Lithuanian and, especially, Polish borders. In essence, Lukashenko was staging an artificial humanitarian crisis in an effort to get concessions out of Brussels. Ever since rigged elections in 2020, European leaders have dismissed the authoritarian Belarusian regime as lacking “any democratic legitimacy,” and Lukashenko was signaling that he was prepared to use any means possible to force them to the negotiating table and get them to lift sanctions.
