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The Daily

How Belarus Manufactured a Border Crisis

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For three decades, President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, a former Soviet nation in Eastern Europe, ruled with an iron fist. But pressure has mounted on him in the past year and a half. After a contested election in 2020, the European Union enacted sanctions and refused to recognize his leadership. In the hopes of bringing the bloc to the negotiating table, Mr. Lukashenko has engineered a migrant crisis on the Poland-Belarus border, where thousands from the Middle East, Africa and Asia have converged. What are the conditions like for those at the border, and will Mr. Lukashenko’s political gamble reap his desired results? Guests: Monika Pronczuk, a reporter covering the European Union for The New York Times; and Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm Monica Prandtuk. I cover the European Union for the times and I'm usually

0:05.5

based in Brussels but for the past couple of days I've been reporting from the

0:09.6

Polish Belarusian border where thousands of asylum seekers from the Middle East

0:14.2

are stuck.

0:18.8

This is a very very difficult environment. This is one of Europe's oldest and

0:24.4

densest forests and in the night the temperatures drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit

0:30.6

and actually I just came back from being outside for two or three hours and I'm

0:36.9

literally shaking it so cold.

0:44.8

So every day I've been going out with activists that are walking around the

0:50.0

forest here looking for people that do make it through and need help.

0:56.9

So we are a couple of hundred meters from the main road and there is a boarding pass

1:05.0

but sometimes you only find sort of ghosts of migrants that are no longer there.

1:11.5

I cannot see the date. Oh no it's here it's 19 of October. So there are boarding

1:17.8

passes. Fresh dates from Iran. Winter shoes and backpack. Sleeping bag. Empty

1:26.1

medicine packages. Baby diapers, hygienic pads. We even found a box of eyeshadow.

1:32.7

Yeah it's a weird weird sight in this forest. So we've been finding all those

1:39.2

objects that were signs that there were people there recently but we have not

1:44.5

seen actual people crossing until Sunday nights when the activists alerted us

1:52.3

that they were going to rescue to Syrian men.

1:59.3

We walked through the forest and we arrived and there are two men wrapped in

2:05.5

those thermal blankets you know the ones that look like tin foil used for

2:10.6

marathons and they're basically completely pale. They were incapable of

...

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