BRUSSELS — The EU must impose new trade restrictions on Belarus to degrade its military industries and deprive it of the ability to wage hybrid war, Lithuania’s foreign minister warned Monday.
Speaking to POLITICO just hours after Lithuania closed its border with neighboring Belarus after a wave of car-sized balloons carrying smuggled cigarettes crossed into its airspace, Kęstutis Budrys said there must be consequences for the incursions, even if they’re not direct security threats.
“We have to expand the Belarusian sanctions regime, including hybrid activities as one of the reasons,” he said. “We have to synchronize sanctions against Russia and Belarus, and there are some sectoral sanctions that we are not synchronized [on], like aviation.”
There are concerns that the Moscow-allied Belarusian state has become a hub for circumventing restrictions on plane parts and other key components that the Kremlin struggles to obtain due to massive sanctions imposed by the EU and its Western partners.
At the same time, Budrys went on, the EU needs to “get serious” on plans to tariff Belarus’ remaining exports to the bloc, calling for punitive new levies “on Belarusian exports and goods and also on Russian.”
According to the Lithuanian government, the balloon incursions are a tactic in its “hybrid war” against the West, which has for years also seen thousands of would-be migrants brought in and trafficked to the border to try and destabilize the Baltic countries and Poland.
Dozens of balloons detected in Lithuania’s airspace in recent days have seen flights grounded and the military ordered to shoot down foreign objects. Ostensibly sent by smugglers trying to bring cheap cigarettes into the EU, Lithuania’s prime minister said Monday the inflatables are part of a coordinated attack on the country and has ordered the border closed to almost all traffic.
Lithuania, Budrys said, will now work with NATO and the EU to determine a joint response and expects not just political support “but also very concrete measures against the Belarusian regime, sending them the clear message that it won’t be tolerated when they weaponize now yet again another instrument against us.”
A string of warplane incursions and drones flying across EU airspace in previous months sparked efforts to agree a bloc-wide air defense program initially dubbed a “drone wall” — however, the plans failed to garner immediate support and work is ongoing to refine longer-term projects to boost joint capabilities. Lithuania and other frontier countries have been urging faster action.
“The Belarusians are helping us with this,” Budrys noted ironically. “They’re just sending additional strong arguments and examples why we need it and what we need. And our argument is that if we are not stopping them here, they will do it elsewhere.”
The EU has strengthened sanctions on Belarus since autocratic leader Alexander Lukashenko was accused of rigging a disputed 2020 election in his favor and offering up the former Soviet republic as a launch pad for Russian attacks on Ukraine.
While the EU’s 19th package of sanctions to be imposed on Moscow since the start of its war on Ukraine includes new measures against Belarusian firms and will enter into force in the coming weeks, experts warn there is still widespread circumvention that enables the two countries to sustain their war economies.
Both European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa condemned Belarus’ actions.
“This is destabilization. This is provocation. We call it by its name: a hybrid threat,” von der Leyen wrote in a social media post on Monday. “This is yet another reason to accelerate our flagships — the Eastern Flank Watch and the European drone defense initiative.”
Costa said “these hybrid activities must stop, and Belarus must prevent further incidents. The EU will continue to put pressure on the regime for its complicity in Russia’s war against Ukraine, and will support the protection of the EU’s eastern border.”
Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda thanked von der Leyen and Costa, writing “together, we will protect the EU borders.”
Ferdinand Knapp contributed reporting.
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