WARSAW, November 17. /TASS/. Russia has great potential to make a significant contribution to efforts to resolve the migrant situation on the Polish-Belarusian border, Poland's former President and Nobel Peace Prize holder Lech Walesa told TASS on Wednesday.
"If Russia wished, order could be restored immediately. We know what a power it is, what power it has with regard to Belarus and beyond," he pointed out.
According to Walesa, Russia could help resolve the crisis. "And I don't know why it is reluctant to do that," he said, suggesting that the reason was that Russia had a negative view of what Poland and the European Union were doing. "It creates an unwillingness to help," the ex-president added.
This year, Polish border guards have thwarted over 35,000 attempts to illegally cross the border from Belarus, a 370-fold rise from last year. Tensions rose dramatically on November 8, when several thousand migrants arrived at the border, trying to break border fences and enter Poland in small groups. The Polish authorities blame the Belarusian leadership for the current developments, saying that it deliberately seeks to attract migrants to send them to the border with the EU and destabilize the situation in the union. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, in turn, blamed the situation on the Western countries whose actions forced people to flee their war-torn homelands.
Poland also made statements about Russia's involvement in the crisis. Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected the accusations, slamming them as attempts to shift responsibility to others. According to him, Russia has nothing to do with the crisis, while Western countries are looking for someone to blame in order to escape responsibility for what is happening at the moment.