Polish Prime Minister accuses Merkel of legitimizing Lukashenko’s regime
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki criticized the acting Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel for a telephone conversation with Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, the DPA agency reports.
"The European Union should get involved in finding a diplomatic solution. But when Chancellor Merkel called Mister Lukashenko, she contributed to legitimising his regime, while the struggle for a free Belarus is going on for 15 months now. Lukashenko also abused his conversation with Angela Merkel. He pretended that Merkel agreed to transport 2,000 immigrants through a corridor to Germany and other European countries. And this is not right," he said, referring to protests that have been taking place in Belarus since last August after the presidential election.
Lukashenko and Merkel held two telephone conversations on November 15 and 17, during which they discussed the migrant crisis. Merkel said that Lukashenko is a contact person in the migration crisis, but this does not change anything in the fact that Germany does not recognize the results of the Belarusian presidential elections in 2020.
Some details of the first conversation between Merkel and Lukashenko were later revealed by Estonian Foreign Minister Eva-Maria Liimets. According to her, Lukashenko put forward an ultimatum: an end to the migrant crisis in exchange for recognizing the legitimacy of his government and lifting all Western sanctions against Belarus.
After the second conversation, Lukashenko's press service reported that the parties reached an understanding that the problem should be discussed between Belarus and the EU. The two sides will determine the representatives who will immediately start negotiations in order to resolve the existing crises. International organizations will also take part in this, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said. During the talks, the wishes of migrants to get to Germany will also be considered.
The migrant crisis on the border of Belarus with Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, where migrants, mainly from the Middle East have been crossing into the EU, sharply worsened on November 8. Several thousand people approached the Polish border from the Belarusian side and remain in the border zone. Some of them tried to cross into Poland by breaking the barbed wire fence. EU countries accuse Minsk of deliberately escalating the crisis and call for the imposition of sanctions.