Finnish Border Guard to send border patrol to Latvia & Lithuania
Finland’s border patrol agency will today send officials and patrol vehicles to Latvia and Lithuania to help address recent migration influxes.
The Finnish Border Patrol assistance follows the Lithuanian government’s declaration of a state of emergency along its southeastern border with Belarus. Lithuania has recorded approximately 1,600 unauthorized entries so far this year. The arrivals represent an increase from 2020, when Lithuania documented only 80 unauthorized entries from Belarus.
Baltic leaders have received aid in processing new migrants from the EU and its border service, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. They allege that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is encouraging migration through Belarus in retaliation for a fourth round of EU sanctions against his regime.
Expect the EU and the Baltics’ European neighbors to continue aiding Baltics states in border capacity-building. Further deployment of EU and national border patrols to assist in processing migrants is near-certain. However, with Belarus remaining largely unresponsive to European attempts at sanction, such assistance is unlikely to remedy the situation. As such, European officials will likely raise the migration influx issue with Russia—Belarus’ chief ally—and provide affected states with financial compensation for hosting arriving migrants to maintain political goodwill within the bloc.
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