'We are guarding Germans, Belgians': Latvia stops 28 migrants from Belarus after tunnel discovery

Latvia stopped 28 migrants who crossed the eastern European Union’s border from Belarus using a tunnel. The underground passage, found around 20 metres from the border, was concealed with moss.

It is the second such tunnel discovered in Latvia. On 10 August, Latvian border guards found another tunnel that had been used by 15 migrants to enter the country from Belarus.

Latvia has been experiencing a rise in irregular migration in recent months — something that European leaders call a hybrid attack by Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s regime — as the country is preparing for parliamentary elections on 3 October.

The country of 2 million has already stopped nearly 10,000 attempts to illegally cross the border in the first eight months of 2026, compared with 12,000 for the whole of last year.

On some days, border guards record more than 100 attempts to cross the 173-kilometre-long fenced border.

But Latvia is not their final destination.

“Latvia is not a target country. We are guarding, you know, Germans, Belgians, Netherlands here in Latvia,” Guntis Pujāts, Chief of the State Border Guard, told Euronews. “They just try to use Latvia, like a trans-country.”

The rise in secondary migration in neighbouring Lithuania, which has registered a fourfold increase in migrants arriving from Latvia, appears to support his words.

However, Pujāts said European countries do not fully understand that Latvia is protecting the whole of Europe.

“Unfortunately, there is not enough understanding about the current situation,” he said.

Latvia is receiving support through bilateral agreements with Estonia, Lithuania and Finland, which have all sent additional border guard personnel to help the country cope with migration pressure. A similar agreement is also expected to be signed with Poland this month.

Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs said that understanding is growing that the Baltic states’ and Poland’s borders with Belarus and Russia are external European borders.

“That understanding is increasing,” he told Euronews.

Where are the migrants coming from?

The influx of migrants from countries outside Europe through Belarus began in 2021, after Lukashenka threatened to facilitate the movement of migrants and drugs into the EU, following the bloc’s sanctions against his regime.

“We haven't had such problems before 2021,” the Border Guard chief, Pujāts, said.

Latvia has kept its official border crossing points open to asylum seekers, but the current migration flows are not using legal routes, he said.

“This is not a legal…migration flow. We have no border with Iran, with Iraq, with Eritrea and with Afghanistan and so on,” Pujāts added. Other countries of origin include Syria, Cameroon and Cuba, with migrants coming “from Africa, Asia, and as well, from America,” he said.

The Latvian Prosecutor General’s Office opened a criminal case against officials of Belarus’ border service in mid-July, following a complaint filed by the State Border Guard.

The complaint states that “since August 2021, the State Border Guard has faced prolonged and systematic migratory pressure on the Latvian-Belarusian border, which should be assessed not as a series of attempts by individual third-country nationals to cross the border illegally, but as deliberate and systematic unlawful activities by a criminal organisation that includes officials of the border authorities of the Republic of Belarus, aimed at illegally moving large numbers of people across the state border of the Republic of Latvia with the intention of causing harm to the Republic of Latvia.”

Asked for proof, Pujāts mentioned some of it.

“We know that [migrants] were transported using Belarusian state vehicles, they lived in Belarusian state facilities and so we understand that this was organised like some revenge or I think even more that Lukashenka thought that the European Union would start some negotiations, you know and pay some money to stop this illegal [migration],” he said.

In the meantime, the Baltic country has stepped up its border protection. Latvia completed the construction of a fence along its 173-kilometre border with Belarus last year, while final works to equip it with additional technology are expected to be completed by the end of this year.

In mid-August, Latvia also launched a security operation “Vilkatis” — or “Werewolf” —against what it describes as instrumentalised illegal migration from Belarus.

Despite support from neighbouring countries, Latvia is still short of around 200 border guards.

“One is technologies, the other is human resources,” said Pujāts.

“We are working to improve our human capacities, to recruit more border guards, and I hope in a … couple of years the situation will be changed in a positive way.”