UN, 13 November. /TASS/. The accusations against Russia due to the situation with refugees from the Middle East on the Belarusian-Polish border are absurd, Grigory Lukyantsev, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s human rights envoy, told the leading Russian news agencies.
"The core of these accusations resembles some kind of absurd situation. All accusations in this regard are addressed to one state, Belarus, although there are already accusations that we [Russia] allegedly had a hand in this, which is generally absurd," the diplomat said.
"On Friday (November 12 - TASS), representatives of Poland [in the UN] and the European Union, who made a general statement, mentioned that it was all the fault of the "criminal Lukashenko regime" (President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko - TASS) and so on. At the same time, they turn blind eye to what is happening in relation to the migrants themselves. They either hush it up, or say that all these are necessary measures. These are outright double standards in assessing the relevant situation," he said.
"We also said on Friday that we should not look for the guilty where they do not exist, and if there are humanitarian issues, then they should be resolved bilaterally," the diplomat noted.
"We were told that among those who are at the border or have already crossed it, there are allegedly citizens of the Russian Federation, but for some reason no specific appeals and requests with specific names have been received by the law enforcement agencies of the respective states," he noted.
The migrant crisis on the border of Belarus with Latvia, Lithuania and Poland unraveled on November 8. Several thousand refugees approached the Polish border from the Belarusian side and are camping out at the border zone. Some tried crossing into Poland by cutting razor wire fences. The European Union is accusing Minsk of intentionally escalating the crisis and has called for more sanctions. Currently, the EU is discussing the possibility of adopting a fifth package of sanctions against Belarus.