MOSCOW, November 17. /TASS/. The use of riot gear by the Polish side against migrants on the border with Belarus is inhuman, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.
"This concerns the life and health of people. They have been staying there for a while and did not arrive because of a good life and on top of that, they are soaked with water in cold weather. And these are women and children. They are also being gassed, threatened with the use of weapons and physical force," the Russian diplomat said.
A campaign is being waged on migrants at the border to exert psychological pressure on them, the spokeswoman stressed.
"This relates to the use of loudspeakers, intimidation, a media campaign that does not provide an opportunity to directly address these people, to defend their positions. It is aimed solely at one thing: to justify the approaches and actions by these authorities that are using the inhuman measures that we see," the Russian diplomat said.
The migration crisis on the border of Belarus with Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, where illegal migrants are seeking to cross into EU territory, escalated on November 8. Several thousand migrants have approached the Polish border from Belarus and are refusing to leave the area. Some of them have attempted to venture into Polish territory by breaking a barbed wire fence. EU countries have accused Minsk of deliberately provoking the crisis and called for more sanctions against Belarus.
For his part, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said that Western countries are to blame for these developments because it is their actions that have caused people to flee countries ravaged by wars triggered by the West.