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Polish court binds detained RT France journalists to pay fine - editor-in-chief

The RT France correspondents were detained on Monday morning near the Polish city of Usnarz Gorny when they were shooting video footage

PARIS, November 15. /TASS/. A Polish court has bound two RT France correspondents, who were detained in Poland near the border with Belarus for working in the emergency situation zone without a permit, to pay a fine, RT France editor-in-chief Xenia Fedorova said on Monday.

"After an hours-long interview, our journalists are contactable again. They were bound to pay a fine. However, they have not yet received their passports back. We are expecting comments from them as soon as they get to the hotel," she wrote on her Twitter account .

The RT France correspondents were detained on Monday morning near the Polish city of Usnarz Gorny when they were shooting video footage.

Amid the migration crisis, Poland has imposed a state of emergency in regions bordering Belarus. No one, including journalists, is allowed to enter these regions. Polish border guards have stopped more than 33,000 illegal border crossings from Belarus this year, an increase of 370 times over the 2020 level. The situation deteriorated on November 8, when several thousand migrants approached the Polish border. From time to time they try to break through the fences and cross into Poland.

Warsaw places responsibility for the situation on Belarus, which, as the Polish side claims, receives migrants and then sends them across the border to Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, seeking to provoke a migration crisis in Europe. Meanwhile, Lukashenko said that the blame for this situation rests on Western countries because people are fleeing their countries gripped by hostilities provoked by their actions.

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