Migrants flood the Eastern Border

Still think Putin is "based?"

In America we are right to be alarmed at the disaster on our southern border. By failing to secure the territory over which he is highest executive authority, the President has betrayed the trust placed in him by his electorate and has failed to lead the state in its performance of that most basic duty. In 2022, he added roughly the population of Chicago to the U.S. by legal immigration alone. By some estimates, he has doubled the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. in just three years’ time, from 10 million to over 20 million, adding almost four Chicagos’ worth. 

History must hold Mr. Biden responsible for all that will follow the importation of so many millions of new inhabitants of unknown background and motivation. Let us hope that voters in both parties will also hold him accountable for this madness.

In the UK and western Europe, too, a sensible liberalism that admits some refugees and immigrants – those keen to embrace the Western order – has been hijacked by a pernicious open-borders policy for millions of largely fighting-age male migrants whose allegiances range from uncertain to openly Islamist. Readers will know that this often reproduces on Western soil the dire cultural conditions that some of those refugees were fleeing in the first place. 

In Western Europe, the British Conservative Party may be the worst offender. In the case of Britain’s Tories, they somehow managed to campaign on vastly decreased immigration, win, and then deliver vastly increased immigration. Anything for a 0.1% increase in GDP, I suppose. Even Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, for all the rhetoric, seems to be doing the same.

So in western Europe, too, let us hope that electorates will reject their leaders’ indifference (or willful malfeasance) by voting in someone who will actually do something before the balance tips in favor of the mullahs.

The Unnoticed Border Crisis

But there is another border crisis that we need to keep in sight. Though further from the American public eye and smaller in absolute numbers, it is of significant long-term concern. I mean the crisis on Western civilization’s eastern border: Where Europe meets Russia – roughly, the same location as the westernmost extent of the thirteenth-century Mongol conquests.

Part of this old frontier cuts through the region where the Russo-Ukrainian War is being fought. There, of course, the war is hot, and the waves of refugees which it has predictably produced constitute a phenomenon in their own right, one I intend to analyze in a future article. Further north, that border falls roughly along much of the EU/NATO border with Russia and its client Belarus.

Belarus is in red. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Belarus_in_Europe_(-rivers_-mini_map).svg

Like its American cousin, the eastern European migration crisis began about three years ago, although for different reasons. Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Soviet strongman still in power, spent 2020 and 2021 crushing mass protests against his sham elections. In July 2021, responding to European sanctions, he promised to send a “flood” of “drugs and migrants” into the EU. Well, he kept his word. In 2020, only 81 people were detained on the Lithuanian-Belarussian border; between January and June 2021, the figure was over 600, and the figure for the seven months to the end of July, after Lukashenko’s “flood” remarks, was 2,400. The majority were Iraqis, Kurds, Afghans, Syrians, Chechens, Iranians, and Egyptians.

Reporting at the time showed that the Belarus option was being widely publicized in Arabic-language media, and that the number of flights from Baghdad, for instance, had more than doubled. Hundreds of migrants were videoed being escorted to the EU border by Belarussian troops. 

In November 2021, the Guardian reported that 30,000 illegal border crossings from Belarus into Poland had taken place that year, with 17,000 of those coming in October alone. In response, the Polish government built a 15-foot wall topped with razor wire along its entire 250-mile border with Belarus, completed by the summer of 2022. This certainly checked the numbers. It did not halt Lukashenko’s “flood” entirely. Border guards report that migrants are often equipped with fence-cutting tools or shovels for digging under the barriers supplied to them by Belarussian authorities. Poles still logged 16,000 attempts to cross in 2022, and more than 20,000 through October 2023. In February of this year, Poland announced it would be further strengthening its borders against the continued threat.

Lithuania, for its part, floated a plan to wall its 400-mile border in autumn 2021. Within a year it had the job mostly done; as of early 2023 all 420 miles of its border with Belarus were said to be surveilled.

Latvia, too, while slower out of the gates, is finally fencing off its shorter 100-mile border with Belarus, the last stretch open to Lukashenko. The construction, only expected to be complete in early 2025, is frequently interrupted by the methods similar to those seen on the Lithuanian and Polish borders. Trees are felled to cross or even crush sections of completed fence, and sections are sawed through by metal-cutting tools – not your standard asylum-seeker equipment. The need for the fence is acute. After the rapid responses of the Lithuanian and Polish governments, Belarus shifted its pressure north, and from 2022 to 2023 the number of attempted crossings into Latvia more than doubled, to over 14,000. In officially reported data, the record is 250 attempted crossings in a 24-hour period. 

Some claim that these numbers are misleadingly inflated, since multiple incidents may involve the same migrant. On the other hand, the real number of attempts may be much higher. “Aivars,” a Latvian national guardsman, offered to speak with a Restoration reporter on condition of anonymity to tell us more about the eastern border crisis. One night last autumn he and his unit, responsible for a stretch some 12 miles long, apprehended 21 young Afghan men in a single group. The next group of guards down the line, more regularly on the border, told him that their nightly record for a similar stretch was over 100 encounters. They are all extremely concerned about what they call a “hybrid” war. Based on their experiences at the border, they say the majority attempting to cross are (yet again) young men who know how to fight. 

As on the southern border of the United States, much reporting on Europe’s eastern border focuses on the alleged cruelty of border guards or on the response of right-of-center parties. There are indeed some horror stories. Doubtless, many migrants are leaving horrible situations and travelling in good faith, hoping for the best whether as knowing or unknowing pawns in Moscow’s game. A starving, dehydrated, ailing person of any description is precisely the wounded traveler in Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan. For people or societies of Christian conviction, I do not see a way around the call to play the part of the Good Samaritan on the Jerusalem-Jericho road.

However, the provision of first aid will be immediately exploited if it is not also bound to a firm deportation policy, whether back to the country of origin (if known and practicable) or back to Belarus. This is of course expensive. As such, Western leaders must insist on a policy of deterrence that will make the journey unprofitable. If they do not, they are complicit in the continued deaths of migrants funneled to their borders by Russia.

How to Subvert a Society with Migrants

Here, says Aivars, the aims of the other side are clear. For one, border swamping is a test of military preparedness, in which tactics and equipment are observed and noted, and EU budgets are drained – both by military demands and by the costs of social integration problems of the sort that Western EU countries have been dealing with for decades.

But just as importantly, the migrant crisis both tests and erodes psychological endurance and societal cohesion. The Belarussians use “violence against illegals,” Aivars argues, “to create conditions in which it is, on humanitarian grounds, difficult for [us] border guards to justify turning people away.” Russian and Belarussian media are always eager to report on the “cold-blooded and hard-hearted human rights violations” by the EU. These reports, in turn, will always find ready echoes in Western media. Aivars says that this is nothing but the old KGB trick known as “demoralization,” by which a state under hybrid attack is presented as an aggressor. This weakens the moral resolve of its leaders and (in democratic states) their electorates. It’s instructive that he used the same word (“demoralization”) as ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov, without prompting.

Putin with Belarussian President Lukashenko. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lukashenko_and_Putin_in_Normandy_format.jpg

Over in the east, it is all accompanied by another Cold War game: the Belarussians regularly set off pyrotechnics that look and sound like real munitions – which initially put the defense on high alert, but which in time, inevitably, are treated as the same old games, and not worthy of much notice. That is, until they are not games anymore, but the real thing, and a column of tanks is over the border and heading for your capital. 

What about the Russian border? In the last few years the Estonian and Latvian borders with Russia have been relatively quiet. Why? First, some background. In many of these states, Russia did the hard, population-shifting work already in the Soviet period: first by targeting local non-Russian “elites” for mass deportation to Siberia, and then by using mass importation to settle Russians in their place. This happened from the Caucasus through Crimea and eastern Ukraine up to the Baltic. The persistent failure to integrate on the part of these importee populations remains a key weapon in Russia’s arsenal. So, on the one hand, Russia need not do much at all on its own borders; it can merely stir the pot it started cooking eighty years ago.

More mundanely, adds Aivars, it is also the case that the Baltic borders with Russia have far more open ground, farmland, and towns than do the Belarussian borders, which run through forests, swamps, and lakes. Migrant-dumping from Russia would thus be even more obvious than it is from Belarus. 

Furthermore, Polish and Baltic governments have long claimed that it is a false dichotomy: Minsk is merely doing Moscow’s bidding. Reports indicate that starting in the second half of 2022, in spite of continued flights from the Middle East to Minsk, most Europe-bound migrants have been entering Belarus via flights to Moscow and then buses or further flights to Belarus. For the most part, Russia has been content to let Belarus take the heat, and has not felt the need to release a flood over its own EU borders with neighboring Estonia and Latvia. On the geopolitical chessboard, there is no need to use a knight where a pawn will do the trick. 

Finland: A Lesson in Resiliance

But Russia’s northernmost border with Europe is another story. Finland, due to its unusual resistance in World War II, was officially neutral during the Cold War. Like Austria, it long avoided NATO membership, while also maintaining, unlike Austria, a robust military. But in response to Putin’s belligerence against Ukraine, it sought NATO’s protection. Russia is plainly not ready to wage open war in that corner of Europe. But it is always ready for hybrid warfare. In this case, it could both punish Finland for joining NATO and test Finns’ resolve by manufacturing the same kinds of headaches that it has been making for Poland and the Baltic. While chances of survival in the Arctic forest are too slim even for Russia to dump migrants along most of the 800-mile border with Finland – not out of humanitarian concern, of course, but because the objective of swamping the West would fail if no one made it there alive –Russia has turned up the pressure in other ways.

In the autumn of 2023, the numbers of asylum-seekers in Finland at border checkpoints were as follows: September – 13; October – 32; in the first two weeks of November – 500. There was no significant change in conscription or domestic Russian politics that could account for this. As the Carnegie Endowment puts it, “No unique insight is required to realize that something has changed on the Russian side. This sort of rapid rise would only have been possible if Russian border guards had stopped checking whether those crossing had documents allowing them to enter Finland. And, in Russia, such a policy change could only have been authorized at the highest political level.”

A Finnish machine gun nest in the Winter War. Credit: Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Finnish_Maxim_M-32_machine_gun_nest_during_the_Winter_War.jpg

Fortunately, the Finns do not think like Mr. Biden. They acted decisively and managed to close all border junctions by the end of November. Not a single application was granted.

Finland learned its most important geopolitical lessons in World War II. But it has clearly also learned from the Polish and Baltic experience with Belarus, and is coordinating its policies with those of its southern allies. Western European governments and peoples should do the same. Their leaders have pursued an aggressive policy of welcoming immigrants from Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, including those who come illegally, often stretching the definition of “refugee” or “asylum-seeker” to do so. I will not comment here on the ways in which this has had, and will continue to have, devastating effects on the liberal social order that Western Europe developed at a very high cost over the course of centuries of wars and revolutions and reforms. Look out for a piece coming soon on the definitions of “refugee” and “asylum-seeker,” and how they have been subverted.

Here I wish only to flag the fact that Mr. Putin is opening the sluice gates and flooding the West with the same sorts of people whom Western leaders are so keen to add to their populations (and electoral rolls) by their unhinged immigration policies. Western electorates urgently need to wake up to the fact that Russia sees our insane open-border policies as an excellent way to weaken the West by draining our budgets, sapping our nerves, and eroding our social cohesion.

In America, of course, we should be wary for the same reasons. Let us learn from Poland, from Finland, and from the Baltics. But let us also not forget them. Together with our Western European friends, we need to remember that we are standing shoulder to shoulder with those who are guarding our civilization’s eastern borders, and doing it so well.