The distressing images of migrants standing in the freezing cold forests that straddle the Belarus-Poland border have united Europeans in contempt for the Belarusian regime that engineered the crisis on its western frontier. Escorted there in order to be deployed as bargaining chips by the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, then pinned back by Polish soldiers under orders to keep them from going any further, thousands of men, women and children are stuck in limbo, struggling with hunger and sub-zero nights. Several have frozen to death.
The blame for this humanitarian crisis lies with Lukashenko, whose foray into people-smuggling is transparently an attempt to do three things: to distract from his misrule and the violent oppression that he uses to stay in power; to sow discord within the European Union; and to retaliate against the tightening EU sanctions that are making life difficult for the regime in Minsk.
[Poland's ruling party] sees the activity on the border not as a humanitarian crisis but as an act of aggression. Its inhumane response is illegal under EU law
Lukashenko has already succeeded in one of these objectives by exposing European fissures that came to the surface during the migrant crisis of 2015-16 but have never gone away. Poland was one of the few countries at the height of that crisis to reject refugee quotas, and the current standoff is occurring against a background of fraught relations between Warsaw and Brussels over the Polish government's dismantling of the rule of law in the country.
The right-wing ruling Law and Justice party has declined to ask for assistance from the EU’s border agency Frontex, which in its view would imply giving the EU some level of control over its eastern border. So it prefers to go it alone.
It sees the activity on the border not as a humanitarian crisis but as an act of aggression. Its inhumane response – to push the refugees back – is illegal under EU and international law.
As a proportion of Poland's population, the number of people attempting to cross its border is tiny. Other EU states are even less directly affected, but, as Minsk and Moscow are aware, governments across Europe are irrationally spooked by migration and its potential to stir up domestic political dissent.
It is no accident, therefore, that Lukashenko has identified Poland as the EU’s current weak point. Nor is it by chance that migration is his weapon. Faced with this blackmail attempt, the EU would ideally say that tactics such as this do not work. Unfortunately, as Lukashenko and his sponsors in the Kremlin are well aware, there is ample evidence that they do work.
When over one million refugees, many of them fleeing from the war in Syria, travelled via Turkey to the EU five years ago, the EU paid off the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan with billions of euro in cash and other incentives so that he would staunch the flow of people.
As [Lukashenko] and Putin see it the EU's approach to migration is proof that in international relations, ideals will always be trumped by interests
Erdogan still uses would-be migrants as a negotiating tool, as he did last year when, frustrated over European criticism of his invasion of northern Syria, he bused thousands of people to the border with Greece, where they were forcibly kept out. Moves duly got under way after that to renew the EU-Turkey deal, with new pledges of cash and trade incentives.
A similar dynamic can be seen in the western Mediterranean, where refugees and migrants are frequently caught in the middle of regional disputes – and where EU states deploy a variety of carrots and sticks to exert pressure on their southern neighbours to tighten their borders. The union spends vast sums on this out-sourcing of its policy, with Morocco, Tunisia and Libya receiving huge sums in migration aid from the EU every year.
In just two days last May some 8,000 people crossed into the Spanish enclave of Cueta in north Africa, many of them risking their lives on treacherous swims. This was widely seen as Morocco leveraging its control over the Cueta border to punish Spain for allowing a militant group leader from Western Sahara, a region Morocco annexed in 1975 and claims as its own, to receive medical treatment.
Around the same time Spain approved a €30 million cash transfer to strengthen Morocco's border policing efforts. Madrid said the spending had already been agreed before the row in May, while European Commission vice-president Margaritis Schinas said "nobody can blackmail the European Union" .
The dictator's latest crackdown on activists and opposition figures make it impossible for the union to be seen to be cutting deals with him
Lukashenko has come to a different conclusion; as he and Putin see it the EU’s approach to migration is proof that in international relations, ideals will always be trumped by interests.
As it happens, the hardening of European attitudes towards migration since 2015 will make it more difficult for Lukashenko to succeed where others have in the past. Whereas Brussels once denounced states for building fences, it now helps to police them.
In addition, the dictator’s latest crackdown on activists and opposition figures make it impossible for the union to be seen to be cutting deals with him. And yet the EU must avoid the trap that Lukashenko has set by meeting an ugly tactic with an ugly response and treating events on the eastern border as a security crisis rather than the humanitarian one that it is.