Ukraine to provide Lithuania with barbed wire for construction of fence on border with Belarus
Ukraine will provide Lithuania with barbed wire for the construction of the fence on the border with Belarus, according to the decision made at a government meeting.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that Ukraine has decided to provide Lithuania with “humanitarian aid” in the form of barbed wire due to the critical situation on the border with Belarus.
According to Kuleba, Lithuania itself asked Ukraine for barbed wire.
The number of illegal migrants who enter Lithuania from Belarus has increased significantly. 171 migrants, which is a record number, were detained yesterday.
In early July, Lithuania declared a state of emergency due to the influx of migrants from Belarus.
The European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex sent a border guard mission to Lithuania and Latvia to strengthen the protection of their borders with Belarus.
The Lithuanian military began to build barbed wire barriers on the border with Belarus.
Estonia will also send Lithuania barbed wire to build a fence.
In recent months, Lithuania has faced an almost twenty-fold increase in the flow of illegal immigrants from Belarus. Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė believes that this is an organized hybrid attack of the Belarusian regime against Lithuania.
The Lithuanian government decided to strengthen the border with an army and create an additional physical barrier by installing a barbed wire fence.
The fence will be built of spiral coils, which are superimposed on each other and connected with special pegs. Lithuanian Defense Minister Arvydas Anušauskas explained that this barrier is intended to briefly slow down migrants at the border until border guards arrived.
Belarus stopped detaining migrants from the Middle East and Africa (and according to unofficial information went as far as bringing them via Iraqi airlines) after the European Union imposed sanctions against the Lukashenka regime after the forced landing of the Ryanair plane and the arrest of the opposition blogger, Roman Protasevich.