Russian and Belarusian security services are helping to funnel migrants from the Middle East and Africa into Latvia and other NATO and EU countries. Latvia believes that, in this way, Russia and Belarus are trying to destabilise the situation ahead of the vote for a new Saeima on 3 October.
The New York Times reports this.
According to Latvian officials, criminal groups lure people to Russia and Belarus on commercial flights. Then, with the assistance of the authorities in those countries, the migrants are taken to the border.
At times, officials say, Moscow and Minsk have even offered migrants charter flights and then provided transport to wooded stretches of the border with Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and other countries. Some migrants travelled via Russia, which, Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braže said, was confirmed by geolocation data from their phones.
This year alone, more than 11,000 people have been turned back at Latvia’s border.
“They are destabilising the situation in order to get politicians more loyal to Russia into parliament,” said General Guntis Pujāts, head of Latvia’s State Border Guard.
Latvian officials say the scheme fits into a broader Kremlin strategy in Europe: using the police, the army and the security services without escalating to open war, while preserving plausible deniability.
As of May, Latvia had provided Ukraine with assistance worth about $1.3bn, which amounts to almost 1% of the country’s GDP.
“This is part of the war industry. They are carrying out a sub-conventional attack, and it includes not only sabotage or state-sponsored terrorist attacks, but also constant hostile information attacks, constant cyberattacks — all of it,” Braže said.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the number of migrants at Latvia’s border has been rising. In 2021, nearly 4,400 people were turned back, and by 2025 that figure had almost tripled. How many people nevertheless managed to cross the border is unknown.
Migrants cut through the fence and, more recently, have been digging tunnels beneath it. Border guards recently found two such tunnels, about 40 and 20 metres long. Similar tunnels have also been discovered on Lithuania’s border with Belarus.
Along the entire border with Belarus, which stretches for more than 170 km, there is a steel fence topped with barbed wire. It is equipped with video cameras, motion sensors and artificial intelligence software that distinguishes people from animals.
According to the Latvian side, smugglers work for criminal groups that cooperate with the Belarusian KGB. Migrants from Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia and Cuba are trying to move further west, including to Germany.
Pujāts said that real control over the situation, in his view, lies with Russia, whose troops operate from Belarusian territory. “Russians like to use other people’s hands for their own purposes,” he said.
- In July, Latvian troops used tear gas and fired a warning shot to stop a group of migrants trying to enter the country from Belarus.
- In early August, on the border with Belarus, Lithuanian border guards found a third underground tunnel in a matter of weeks. It was dug beneath the border barrier at a depth of about 1.5 metres and reinforced with logs and planks. The route had not yet been completed and did not have an exit beyond the physical barrier at the border.