“The overall situation is that we are seeing progress on all fronts,” Margaritis Schinas said at a press conference in Lebanon.
“Monday I will be travelling to Baghdad and hopefully later next week to Ankara,” he said, speaking after a meeting with Lebanese President Michel Aoun.
“I feel this is the moment where Europe is, in a way, counting our friends and we are very happy to see that we have many,” he said.
Turkey on Friday banned citizens of Syria, Iraq and Yemen from flying from Turkish airports to Belarus, where migrants hoping to cross illegally into Poland have been massing.
Western governments accuse Alexander Lukashenko’s regime of luring migrants to Belarus and sending them to cross into Poland in retaliation for previous sanctions over Minsk’s crackdown on the opposition in the wake of a presidential election last year.
Lebanon is one of the countries from which would-be migrants have been flying to Minsk to connect with smugglers.
Schinas said a fresh batch of sanctions against the Belarus regime was on its way.
“We have already enacted a number of sanctions against the Belarussian regime and we’ll be reinforcing those with a fifth package that will come into force next week,” he said.
The bloc has also threatened action against other countries or airlines that contribute to the crisis by transporting migrants to Belarus.
Poland has deployed 15,000 troops along the border, put up a fence topped with barbed wire and approved construction of a wall on the frontier with Belarus.
Meanwhile, Belarus and Russia have announced joint military exercises near the Polish border. A “joint tactical battalion group” with paratroopers from both countries is holding exercises in the Grodno region in western Belarus, the Belarusian Defense Ministry announced on Telegram on Friday. It justified the move with the “increase in military activity” near the Belarusian border.
According to Minsk, Russian Il-76 military aircraft and Belarusian military helicopters are also involved in the exercises. According to Russian news agencies, the Ministry of Defense in Moscow said it was a surprise mission to “check the combat readiness” of the troops.
The World Health Organization said on Friday it was “very concerned” about the health situation of thousands of migrants stranded in Belarus amid a border standoff with the European Union.
We urge “all states to protect the right to health of refugees and migrants along the Belarusian border, many of whom need medical assistance,” said WHO Europe director Hans Kluge.
“I am very concerned about the thousands of vulnerable people who are stranded in no-man’s land on Belarus’ borders with Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, at the mercy of the weather as winter fast approaches,” he said.
Hundreds of migrants, mainly Kurds, have been stuck for days on the Belarusian-Polish border in near-freezing temperatures, with aid groups warning of a looming humanitarian catastrophe.
At least 10 have died in the region, seven of them on the Polish side of the border, according to the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza.
Western states accuse the Belarusian government of luring them to the country and sending them to cross into Poland in retaliation for sanctions over Minsk’s crackdown on the opposition.
