MINSK, November 15. /TASS/. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has confirmed his intention to make a firm response to the EU’s new sanctions over the migrant crisis, adding that the country had no space to retreat, the BelTA news agency reports.
"They are threatening us with sanctions. Ok, let's wait and see. They think that I will be joking. That it was an empty threat. Nothing of the sort. We will fight back. It’s the limit. There is no space for us to retreat," he said at a meeting with the working group for finalizing the draft of the constitution on Monday.
Lukashenko said that Minsk was being accused of triggering the migration crisis and for that reason the European Union was threatening with another package of sanctions. "Organizing a flow of migrants through Belarus is an unaffordable luxury that would certainly backfire on us. We have never done that and we are not going to do this in the future," he said.
Earlier, Lukashenko warned that should sanctions against his country be expanded, he would stop transit gas traffic to Europe via the trans-national gas pipeline Yamal-Europe.
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. There are about 2,000 migrants in the improvised camp at the moment.
The EU countries have blamed Minsk for the intentional escalation of the crisis and called for more sanctions. Lukashenko said that in this situation the responsibility rested squarely on the Western countries, whose policies had forced people to flee from war.