A Feb. 10 article in the New York Times details the latest example of how migrants are increasingly being used as political pawns in Europe, with Finland accusing Russia of assisting asylum seekers to reach the border of Finland, which is holding a vote on Sunday for its new president.
“Poking up through the snow drifts on the Finnish-Russian border lies a symbol of Moscow’s biggest provocation yet toward NATO’s newest member: a sprawling heap of broken bicycles,” the story notes.
“The battered bikes are sold for hundreds of dollars on the Russian side to asylum seekers from as far away as Syria and Somalia. They are then encouraged — sometimes forced, according to Finnish guards — to cross the border. Finns say it is a hybrid warfare campaign against their country, using some of the world’s most desperate people, just as it is staking out a new position in a shifting world order,” writes Erika Solomon.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban has also been accused of easing the path of migrants through Hungary to neighboring Slovakia.
Kelly Greenhill wrote about this disturbing trend in a 2022 piece published in Foreign Affairs.
She is a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at SOAS University of London, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, and a Senior Research Scholar at MIT.
“In the fall of 2021, the leaders of several European countries announced that they were being confronted by an entirely new security threat: weaponized migration,” wrote Greenhill.
Over the course of a few months, Alexander Lukashenko, “the authoritarian leader of Belarus, enticed thousands of migrants and would-be asylum seekers, primarily Kurds from Iraq and Syria, as well as some Afghans, to his country with promises of easy access to the European Union.”
“Although it has multiple uses, weaponized migration is often employed as an instrument of state-level coercion, undertaken to achieve a wide range of geopolitical and other foreign policy goals that have been frustrated by other means,” Greenhill notes.
She said that when weaponized migration is used, it is often successful. “In nearly three-quarters of the 81 cases I have identified, the tactic achieved at least some of the desired objectives; in well over half, it obtained most or all of what was sought.”
The Immigration and Refugee News Digest 