MINSK, November 23. / TASS /. The Belarusian authorities, jointly with the representatives of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), are hammering out the measures to settle the migration crisis on the border with Poland and repatriate the refugees willing to return to their homes, Head of the Citizenship and Migration Department of the Belarusian Internal Affairs Ministry Alexei Begun stated.
"Currently, the representatives of the IOM and the UNHCR are in Belarus, they are holding a number of meetings with the government bodies to develop joint steps to resolve the migration crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border," the head of the department noted.
Begun said that the sides would work out "the joint activities to repatriate those who seek to return to their homeland as well as to regulate their legal status and possible admission to a third country that wants to accept them."
The migrant crisis on the border of Belarus with Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, where migrants have rushed since the beginning of the year, sharply escalated on November 8. Several thousand people came from the Belarusian side to the Polish border and did not leave the border zone. Some of them tried to enter Poland by breaking the barbed wire fence. The EU countries accuse Minsk of deliberately escalating the crisis and call for the imposition of sanctions. Meanwhile, President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko stated that the Western countries themselves were to blame for this situation, because of their actions people were fleeing the war.