NATO will react immediately

NATO will react immediately

Stoltenberg assessed that the crisis is a new hybrid attack of Belarus and that NATO will react because of that.

"What we see at the border and how the Belarusian government is using migrants as an instrument of a hybrid attack is very disturbing and we are dealing with it carefully in NATO. We have decided to send a team of NATO experts to the Belarusian-Lithuanian border. It should help Lithuania fight those hybrid threats, along with assessing the situation on the spot", Stoltenberg told the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita.

Lithuania and Poland, meanwhile, began erecting a 2.5-meter-high fence on the border with Belarus on Wednesday to prevent illegal crossings of refugees, mainly from Afghanistan and Iraq, seeking asylum in Poland.

The fence which the government of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki find inspiring, similar to the one erected by Hungary on the border with Serbia in the midst of the refugee crisis, will be placed on 180 km of the green land border with Belarus, where barbed wire is already provisionally stretched.

In a new poll for Polsat TV, 47.4 percent of Poles support the decision to fence Poland and not allow the opening of a new migration route, when refugees come legally to Belarus on a tourist visa, often by plane to Minsk and then try to cross into Poland, applying for asylum, and since May Belarus has refused to receive them back under the international readmission agreements it has signed.

Polish authorities do not allow humanitarian organizations to supply the refugees with food, water, hygiene needs, tents and blankets, or doctors, justifying it by the fact that the group is on Belarusian territory and instead the Polish authorities sent an aid convoy that remained blocked at the border crossing because the Belarusian authorities did not allow it to enter.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on Wednesday issued an interim measure ordering Poland and Latvia, where a group of 41 Iraqi Kurds is camping on the border with Belarus, to urgently deliver food, water and clothes to refugees held hostage at the border, and to provide them with the necessary medical assistance.

The temporary measure, which is valid until September 15, obliges Latvia and Poland to receive requests for asylum of those refugees at the border, but not to let them, even temporarily, on their territory, although the European Court recommends that.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko several times in recent days of trying to destabilize neighbors and open a new refugee route in retaliation for EU sanctions so that tens of thousands of refugees from Afghanistan and Asia can flock to Poland and the Baltic states, as they have no problem in obtaining Belarusian tourist visas.