UNITED NATIONS, November 13. /TASS/. Over 2,000 migrants have gathered near the Belarusian-Polish border seeking asylum in the EU, Permanent Representative of Belarus to the United Nations Valentin Rybakov stated on Friday.

"Currently, there are over 2,000 destitute people on the border, including women and children," the diplomat noted at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly Third Committee. According to him, all these people "do not consider Belarus as the place of their stay." "They want to apply for asylum in the EU. Instead of this, our neighbors poison them with gas, shoot above [their] heads and pull military equipment with large-caliber combat weapons to the border," the envoy stated. According to him, "there are numerous testimonies and irrefutable pieces of evidence" confirming this.

The Belarusian representative stressed that "Poland and Lithuania are using the situation around the migrants as an excuse to pump financing out of the EU and justify their anti-immigrant policy and numerous violations of corresponding international obligations as well as are trying to elevate their role in European politics by demonizing Belarus."

The migrant crisis on the Belarusian border with Latvia, Lithuania and Poland where the migrants have been flocking since the beginning of the year, sharply aggravated on November 8. Several thousand people approached the Polish border from Belarus and refused to leave the area. Some of them attempted to enter Poland by destroying a barbed-wire fence. EU countries have accused Minsk of the intentional escalation of the crisis and have called for sanctions. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko stated that the Western countries themselves were to blame for the situation since people were fleeing the war in their homelands because of the West’s actions.