MOSCOW, November 8. /TASS/. The Western countries’ charges the migration crisis on the border between Belarus and the European Union is a "hybrid operation" by President Alexander Lukashenko are lies, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a talk show on the Rossiya-1 federal television news channel on Tuesday.
"Nobody should argue that this is some hybrid operation by the Belarusian president ostensibly enjoying some support, or that this is an accidental development or a string of events taken out the context. This is a lie," Zakharova said.
She expressed the hope that the West would not disclaim the responsibility for imposing its mode of life on migrants.
"These people have been persuaded over many years, I should say, decades, that a high standard of living exists only in the West," Zakharova said. "By and large the West is demonstrating collective and wholesale neglect of the values it has been talking about for many years."
Earlier on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov urged the EU countries to avoid double standards in the migration crisis on Belarus' border with Poland and Lithuania. He stressed that "this crisis stems from the policies that the NATO and EU countries have conducted towards the Middle East and Northern Africa for many years, trying to make them accept the understanding of a better life and the West’s interpretation of democracy."
The migration crisis on the Belarusian borders with Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, where migrants began to flock in since the beginning of this year, went into high gear on November 8. Several thousand people approached the Polish border on the Belarusian side and tried to cross into Poland. In an attempt to storm the border they broke a barbed wire fence. The EU countries have blamed Minsk for the intentional escalation of the crisis and called for more sanctions. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said that in this situation the responsibility rested squarely on the Western countries, whose policies had forced people to flee from war.