Originally published 2021-11-15.
In the autumn of 2021, thousands of people from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and other countries found themselves trapped in the forests between Belarus and Poland. Many had flown to Minsk on what were sold as tourist trips, believing the European Union lay just beyond the tree line. The EU, Poland and many independent analysts concluded that the government of Alexander Lukashenko had deliberately organised this flow to punish Europe for its sanctions, a tactic critics compared to the way Turkey had used the threat of migration in its own disputes with Brussels.
This article explains what happened, why Belarus was accused of using migrants as leverage, how the Turkish comparison holds up, and what the episode meant for the people caught in the middle.
What happened on the Belarus–Poland border
The pressure started on the Lithuanian frontier. Lithuania normally saw only a few dozen irregular crossings from Belarus in an entire year, yet by June 2021 the figure was in the hundreds and by July in the thousands. Vilnius declared a state-level emergency on 2 July. Latvia followed with its own emergency in August, and the main pressure then shifted south to Poland.
Poland deployed its armed forces to the border from 18 August and declared a state of emergency in the border zone on 2 September, closing the area to journalists and aid workers. By mid-November the number of soldiers, border guards and police in the region had roughly doubled, and on 8 November several hundred migrants, escorted by Belarusian forces, tried to break through near the Kuźnica–Bruzgi crossing. A second attempt on 16 November ended with Polish officers using water cannon, tear gas and stun grenades against people throwing stones.
Behind those scenes was a quieter human story. Families camped for weeks in freezing temperatures, short of food and water, unable to go forward into Poland or back into Belarus. At least 20 people died that winter from cold, exhaustion and, according to rights groups, mistreatment at the border.
Why Belarus was accused of engineering the crisis
The timing was not random. Lukashenko has ruled Belarus since 1994, and the presidential election of August 2020 was widely regarded as rigged. Mass protests followed and were met with mass arrests, beatings and credible reports of torture. The EU, the United States, the UK and Canada responded with sanctions.
Relations collapsed further in May 2021, when Belarusian authorities forced Ryanair Flight 4978 to land in Minsk and arrested the opposition journalist Roman Protasevich, who was on board. The EU banned Belarusian aircraft from its airspace and added more sanctions. Soon afterwards Lukashenko publicly warned that Belarus would no longer stop migrants and drugs heading west.
What followed looked organised. Investigations summarised on Wikipedia describe Iraqi travel agencies advertising cheap “tourist” packages to Belarus, state-linked Belarusian tour firms handling arrivals, visas on arrival for some Middle Eastern nationals from August 2021, and extra flights from Baghdad, Istanbul, Dubai and Damascus. Many migrants reported paying thousands of euros for the journey. Once in Minsk, numerous accounts describe people being driven to the frontier and pushed towards it by Belarusian security forces.
Belarus denied running a scheme and blamed the EU for refusing to accept refugees. Most European governments and the EU institutions instead described it as a “hybrid attack”: using vulnerable people to create political pressure without firing a shot.
The Turkish comparison
The idea that a state can turn migration into a bargaining chip did not begin in Minsk. The journalist Seth J. Frantzman, writing an analysis for The Jerusalem Post on 8 November 2021, put it bluntly: “Belarus appears to be using a tactic perfected by Turkey back in 2020.”
He was referring to events on the Greek border. Turkey hosts the largest refugee population in the world, mostly Syrians who fled the civil war, and under a 2016 agreement the EU funded refugee programmes in Turkey in exchange for Ankara limiting departures towards Greece. On 28 February 2020, after 33 Turkish soldiers were killed in Syria's Idlib province, Ankara announced it would no longer stop people heading for Europe. Tens of thousands gathered at the Evros river near the Greek village of Kastanies. Greece closed the border, police used tear gas, and EU leaders flew to the area to show support for Athens (2020 Greek–Turkish border crisis).
The two cases are not identical. Turkey genuinely hosts millions of refugees who arrived over years of war next door, while Belarus had very few until its own government helped bring people in. But the logic is similar: a neighbouring state opens or closes the tap of migration to win concessions, and the people involved become instruments in a negotiation they had no part in.
A humanitarian crisis inside a political one
Frantzman's wider point was that Europe's response had been short-term. EU countries had long paid neighbours to hold migrants back, and walls and fences kept going up. In his view this outsources abuses rather than solving them, and leaves real refugees, including survivors of the genocide against the Yazidis, without safe, legal ways to seek protection.
Both things can be true at once. A government can cynically exploit migrants, and those migrants still have individual stories, needs and, in some cases, strong claims to asylum. Polish and Lithuanian measures that pushed people back without hearing their claims drew criticism from the UN refugee agency, the Council of Europe and human rights groups, while Poland argued it was defending the EU's external border against a hostile state.
How the standoff ended and what followed
International pressure eventually cut the supply lines. Iraq had already suspended direct flights to Minsk in August 2021. In November, Turkey restricted ticket sales to Belarus for Iraqi, Syrian and Yemeni citizens, the Belarusian airline Belavia began refusing to board them, and Iraq organised a repatriation flight that took around 430 people home on 18 November. Iraq also closed Belarusian honorary consulates in Baghdad and Erbil.
Crossing attempts peaked in October 2021 and fell sharply the next year, though they never returned to pre-crisis levels. Poland completed a steel barrier along much of the border in 2022, Lithuania built a fence of more than 500 km, and pressure rose again from 2024. In March 2025 Poland temporarily suspended the right to apply for asylum at the Belarusian border, with the backing of the European Commission.
What the episode teaches
- Migration can be weaponised. European officials now use the phrase “instrumentalisation of migration” in law and policy, a direct legacy of 2021.
- Sanctions have side effects. Isolated regimes may look for pressure points their opponents find politically painful, and migration is one of the most sensitive in Europe.
- Borders and rights collide. Securing a frontier against a hostile government and giving each person a fair hearing are both legal obligations, and the crisis showed how hard it is to do both under pressure.
- Context matters when reading the news. Calling the people at the fence “weapons” describes the strategy of a government, not the people themselves.
Sources: Belarus–European Union border crisis (Wikipedia); 2020 Greek–Turkish border crisis (Wikipedia); Seth J. Frantzman, The Jerusalem Post, 8 November 2021.
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