Latvia’s Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins assesses the intensification of border protection along the adjacent border with Belarus as a “proactive measure”.
“We are simply increasing our presence and sending a clear signal to both our society and the Belarusian authorities that there will be no joking around,” he says, according to the German news website n-tv.de on Latvian television. The prime minister of the Baltic EU and NATO country stressed that the border between Latvia and Belarus is at the same time an external border of the EU, which has been protected and will continue to be protected.
Latvia, as well as Lithuania and Poland, expresses concern about the activities of mercenaries of the Russian private army Wagner in neighboring Belarus. In addition, these countries accuse the regime in Minsk of deliberately trying to smuggle migrants from crisis areas across its borders into the European Union, as the German news platform deutschlandfunk reports.
Image: kremlin.ru, 2023 Moscow Victory Day Parade 03, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (image size modified)
