PM Mitsotakis: Instrumentalization of migrants is a hybrid threat
The instrumentalization of migrants as a means of exerting political pressure is a “hybrid threat for Europe,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis wrote in the French newspaper Le Figaro.
In an article published late on Sunday, the Greek prime minister referred to the situation on the Belarus border where thousands of migrants are daily trying to enter the EU via Belarus, saying – in reference to the event at Greece’s Evros land border with Turkey in early 2020 – that the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, had “drawn inspiration from a strategy that has already been tested and which caused chaos and misery on Europe’s borders.”
Mitsotakis also accused the president of Belarus of using human suffering to force Europe to abandon plans to impose new sanctions on his regime. “We cannot accept the imposition of this strategy, either now or in the future,” he stressed.
Addressing the EU, the Greek prime minister warned that such tactics of instrumentalizing migrants will be used again and again, to the detriment of Europe, as long as EU countries do not take the necessary measures to address two key weaknesses: the lack of a fair, coherent, effective and stable European policy, and the lack of effective action to combat the phenomenon of trafficking in human beings under the guidance of either criminals or third-country governments. [AMNA]
