VILNIUS, August 17. /TASS/. Most of the illegal migrants from Asia and Africa who have reached Lithuania from Belarus in recent months want to continue their way further on to EU countries and are unwilling to return back to their home countries, Evelina Gudzinskaite, director of the Lithuanian interior ministry’s migration department, said on Tuesday.
"They don’t believe what our officials are saying that Lithuania will not let them to other EU countries and hope to be allowed to continue their way further on to the West at some time," she said.
According to Gudzinskaite, illegal migrants are unwilling to leave Lithuania where they are kept at special accommodation centers without the right of free movement across the country. "Our task is to explain to them that their expectations are groundless," she noted, adding that for this end special mobile teams have been set up to do explanatory work at the camps where the migrants are currently situated.
More than 4,000 illegal migrants have been detained at the Lithuanian-Belarusian border since the beginning of the year, which is 50 times as many as in 2020. In late May, Lukashenko said that his country had served as a barrier to the flows of illegal migrants to Lithuania but, given the current ramped-up Western political pressure against Belarus, Minsk warned that it could stop performing this function.