UNITED NATIONS, November 12. /TASS/. Poland is violating international norms by its treatment of migrants on the border with Belarus, Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky said on Thursday.
"There are lots of cases when Polish and Lithuanian border guards beat migrants and pushed them back to the Belarusian territory. I would say that this is total shame and total violation of all possible international conventions and rules," he told reporters in the run-up to a UN Security Council meeting on the issue.
The diplomat went on to say that Russia had many questions to European Union countries about the migrant crisis on the border between Belarus and Poland, and would certainly ask them.
At the same time, Polyansky added that after a readmission treaty with the EU was suspended, "there are no reasons to send them [migrants] back to the countries where they came from." "That would be a total violation of any international conventions," he said.
In his words, Russia and Belarus are not helping migrants to get to the border with Poland in any way.
"No, absolutely not," he said, answering to a reporter’s question.
The diplomat went on to say that he disagreed with Western nations’ attempts to portray the migrant crisis as artificially created.
"You will find it when you will speak to the refugees. I saw several reports, for example, by the German TV. The German television reported from a place where people who managed to get from Poland to Germany are placed now. And they are telling their stories, they are telling <…> that it was absolutely their decision, nobody pushed them, and they have legal reasons, because Belarus does not have a visa regime with some countries," he said.
The migrant crisis on Belarus’ border with Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, which has been growing since the start of the year, exploded on November 8, when several thousand people amassed on the Belarusian side of the border fence with Poland, refusing to leave the area. Some EU countries accused Minsk of deliberately exacerbating the crisis, calling for sanctions against the Belarusian government. The country’s president Alexander Lukashenko blamed the predicament on Western countries, since it had been precisely their actions that had forced these people to flee their war-ravaged homelands.