Africa Business Radio

The European Union has decided to impose new sanctions against Belarus, accusing it of driving a crisis that has left thousands of migrants and refugees stranded in freezing forests on its borders with the EU. The Western bloc seeks to stop the policy by Belarus to push migrants towards it in revenge for earlier sanctions. Belarus has rejected the allegations. The asylum seekers, who are mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan, began arriving on Belarus’s land borders with the EU this year, trying to cross into member states Lithuania, Latvia and Poland via routes not used before. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas says the inhumane system of using refugees as tools to exert pressure on the European Union has got worse over the last few days pledging to target those involved in what he called human trafficking.