The refugees caught in a political chess game

A border between Poland and Belarus which has been at the centre of a geopolitical conflict is now quiet. Thousands of asylum-seekers, many of them fleeing conflict zones in the Middle East, were trapped in Belarus hoping to cross over into Poland. On Thursday, Belarussian authorities cleared the main camps, but it’s not known what will happen to the people still trying to cross into the EU.

Mark MacKinnon is The Globe’s senior international correspondent. He was recently in Poland and explains why the situation is widely considered a manufactured crisis motivated by revenge, what the geopolitical implications are and how the people seeking refuge are caught in the middle.

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