Make no mistake about it. The flood of refugees from Ukraine as a result of Russia’s invasion is part of a broader plan by Vladimir Putin to split the Western Alliance.
“Refugees are not a design flaw of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine,” the New York Times states in a April 1, 2022 editorial, “Putin Knows What He’s Doing With Ukraine’s Refugees. This Is the World’s Big Test.”
“Indiscriminate bombing and shelling of civilian infrastructure is part of a broader strategy to demoralize the civilian population and drive residents into neighboring countries, where their presence can be destabilizing,” the editorial goes on to say, noting that in 2021, Aleksandr Lukashenko, the ruler of Belarus, “apparently manufactured a crisis by encouraging migrants to cross into Poland.”
All of this highlights the need to support countries that are hosting refugees, thus making this tactic of trying to weaponize refugees less effective, the editorial notes.
Putin “has weaponized refugees (particularly women, children, the elderly and infirm) as a potent way to destabilize neighboring nations — in this case, Poland, Romania, Moldova and, eventually, other Western European countries,” wrote Mark C. Poznansky, Michael V. Callahan and Jacki A Hart in a recent opinion piece in the Hill newspaper.
And this is not the first time Putin has been accused of weaponizing refugees.
U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, the supreme allied commander in Europe for the 28-member military alliance NATO in 2016 told a Senate hearing that Putin and Syrian President Bashar Assad were weaponizing the region’s refugee crisis and using it to undermine Europe’s security and unity.
The Immigration and Refugee News Digest 