As Poland has been one of the primary victims of the crisis on the EU’s eastern border, one would hope that this experience would make it reconsider its hitherto staunch opposition towards a robust, solidarity-based EU migration policy. Instead, the go-it-alone approach of the Polish government and its reliance on physical barriers and pushbacks have undermined Poland’s human rights record, and demonstrated a missed opportunity to show the full potential of inter-EU cooperation. The fact that the Union itself has done little to change Poland’s approach, and has failed to bring migration policy into the picture, poses serious moral questions and risks future vulnerability to migration weaponisation.

The EU’s decision to ban Belarusian airlines’ access to EU airports and airspace is not pragmatic and risks the ‘Donbassisation’ of Belarus in line with Russia’s playbook. The EU’s policy towards Belarus needs to have at its heart the strategic objectives of securing people-to-people contacts, promoting European values and keeping Belarus and its citizens close to the EU.

An interview with Balázs Jarábik, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Interviewers: Iwona Reichardt and Daniel Gleichgewicht of New Eastern Europe

NEW EASTERN EUROPE: You recently attended the high-level Minsk Dialogue Forum. Among the speakers was Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka. How do you interpret his participation in this event that gathers international experts and representatives of the third sector? What kind of message did he intend to send to the wider world?

BALÁZS JARÁBIK: The most important thing was the fact that he attended a civil society conference. As far as I am aware, this was his first such occurrence. It certainly illustrated how the attitude of the regime is slowly changing vis-à-vis civil society in Belarus. Currently there are several interesting areas internally where co-operation is moving and where the government is beginning to understand the value of civil society.