Lithuania builds barbed wire fence on the border with Belarus
On Friday, July 9, The Lithuanian army began to install a barbed wire fence on the southern border with Belarus near the city of Druskininkai, reported the Lithuanian news agency BNS.
The total length of the border section where barbed wire fence will appear is about 30 kilometers. The fence is being built in this location because since the beginning of the year the largest number of illegal migrants, more than half a thousand, have been detained here. In total, during 2021, at least one and a half thousand migrants, mainly from Iraq, illegally crossed the Lithuanian border with Belarus.
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.
This week, 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.