In mid-August 2021, 32 Afghans were found in Usnarz Górny, a small town on the Polish side of the Belarus border, on the EU’s eastern edge. Polish soldiers imprisoned them in inhumane conditions, in a camp ringed by barbed wire. After two months, some people managed to escape. No-one knows their whereabouts.
Since then, the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border has intensified as up to thousands of people – who have escaped Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries de-stabilized by Western powers – try to reach the EU via Minsk, the Belarusian capital.
