Since the start of the migrant crisis along Poland’s border with Belarus last year, over 11,000 migrants have managed to make their way to Germany in an effort to claim asylum.
In total, 11,213 migrants were recorded by Germany’s federal police in 2021 as having arrived in the country from Poland after crossing the European Union border from Belarus, with the month of October alone seeing 5,294 migrants arriving.
Since October, however, the number of migrants has reduced significantly, with December’s numbers being just a tenth of those in October, according to a report from the European Union-funded website InfoMigrants.
The migrants are said to have mostly arrived in the Brandenburg region of Germany, which lies on the border with Poland. The regional government has taken steps to request the German federal government help redistribute the migrants to other areas of the country.
The migrant crisis along the Belarusian route began last summer and saw migrants attempt to make crossings into Poland as well as other neighbouring EU states such as Lithuania, which reported a fifty-fold increase in illegal arrivals from Belarus in august.
Belarus and its President Alexander Lukashenko have been accused of engaging in “hybrid warfare” by using migrants to put pressure on the Europan Union after the bloc enacted sanctions against the Lukashenko regime.
In September, the Polish government enacted a state of emergency on the border due to the influx of arrivals from Belarus, the first of its kind since the fall of communism in the 1990s.
Polish authorities have slammed the Belarusian government’s actions, with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stating that the actions of Lukashenko and his government were the “greatest attempt to destabilise Europe” since the Cold War.
“This is just the beginning. The dictators will not stop. I want to assure you, Poland will not yield to blackmail and will do everything to stop the evil threatening Europe,” Morawiecki said.
In October, during the height of arrivals in Germany on the Belarusian route, former German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer went even further, stating that Russian President Vladimir Putin, a close ally of Lukashenko, bore some responsibility for the crisis.