This year, more than 12,000 attempts to illegally cross the Belarusian-Latvian border have been prevented. Migrants have become part of Belarus' hybrid war and a tool in the hands of its special services.
Lithuanian media have repeatedly reported this summer about groups of migrants who have entered Latvia's southern neighbour not directly from Belarus, but via Latvia. Illegal travelers caught in this way are returned to the country whose border they crossed first.
This summer, Latvia was forced to take back more than eight hundred migrants from neighbouring countries. But after the introduction of the special border security measures dubbed Operation "Vilkatis" ('Werewolf'), around seventy such illegal migrants have been returned to Latvia.
But at the same time, with the more effective closure of the border, aggression and threats of sabotage are growing.
Deputy Chief of the State Border Guard Ivars Ruskulis says:
"This is how the flow of these illegals to the European Union is being restricted and the business of all those criminal groups who are behind this whole phenomenon is being restricted. It is clear that things are not going the way they would like, they are stopping and thinking, and now the issue of how to get these people across the border must be addressed in some way."
There have been at least two cases in the past week when persons from the Belarusian side have thrown stones at Latvian border guards.
But one of the biggest incidents of recent times occurred in early October. A group of about 10-20 people had crossed the border illegally, and on the other side there were several more people, most likely their escorts.
"They made threats, brandished an object resembling a weapon. And with that, they achieved that our soldiers, reacting appropriately, took a correspondingly better tactical position, and then with that, the illegal migrants had the opportunity to go back to Belarus," says Colonel Guntars Strazdītis, of Latvia's National Armed Forces (NBS), which is assisting border guards.
On the Latvian side, between 100 and 200 NBS soldiers are on duty every day.
The day after that incident, some border infrastructure was sabotaged. But a few days later, an episode in the information battlefield followed – a group calling itself"Black Russians" appeared on the Telegram social media channel and announced that they had been to the Latvian side of the border, damaged the infrastructure and returned, and that there would be more such cases.
Experts point out that nothing like this could have happened in Belarus without dictator Alexander Lukashenko's knowledge, which he himself admitted a day later.
"This is his completely open admission that he is instrumentalizing this entire event, or, on the contrary, that he has no control at all over what is happening on the border, is unable to control it. There is pure business going on there and, so to speak, big money is being made in the style of the Wild West," emphasizes Arvis Zīle, head of Latvia's Crisis Management Center.
There is no guarantee that a group of saboteurs will not enter Latvia through some sabotaged section of the border. But such situations have been trained for.
"There are no guarantees. The hybrid threat, as I said, is part of Russia's doctrine. The way they fight - let's look at Ukraine, let's look at Georgia, there were also these initial hybrid phases there, where forces were infiltrated, which then appeared inside the territory. There are no guarantees, but there are also no such indications about specific things at the moment," emphasizes NBS Colonel Strazdītis.
Electrical switchboards have been damaged, video cameras destroyed, and more – more than 60 cases of infrastructure damage have been registered this year, according to Border Guard data. Last year there were 23 such cases.
In July, the Prosecutor General's Office initiated criminal proceedings over the intent to commit serious crimes against the state of Latvia.
"In this particular criminal case, there are reasonable suspicions that Belarusian border guard officials are involved in organizing illegal migration and at the same time they are also damaging our infrastructure to facilitate the criminal offence," says Andris Aleksejevs, a prosecutor with the State Security Protection Department of the Prosecutor General's Office.
The illegal migration route costs around five thousand dollars per person, most often paid in cryptocurrency. People generally travel through Russia to Belarus and further to camps near the border, where they wait for the signal to cross the border. According to the evidence obtained in the case, migrants stay in the camps for a few days, but sometimes for a long time, even months, if they fail to cross the border.
"They are regularly visited by officials in uniform, who line up people and check by photos whether they have paid for illegal border crossings," says Aleksejevs.
In the event that individuals fail to pay, they have a choice – either they are sent to do damage to Latvian infrastructure, or they are physically harmed or otherwise tortured,
The information obtained in the case shows that the moment these people enter Latvia, they know exactly where and what to damage, it happens literally within a few seconds. They have tools, metal saws with them. And after the crime, they return to Belarus.
In the prosecutor's opinion, people who came from, for example, Africa, with the aim of entering the European Union could not have planned the whole thing themselves. It is clear that this scheme has become part of an international migration network.
"All countermeasures, destructive actions, harmful actions, and actions threatening our officials are mostly related to the fact that migrants are not getting through, because then business has stopped in the criminal environment in which they are involved, in all this cooperation. Our operational officers also work there, investigators are also very active in liaison with Europol, the investigation is taking place at the international level," says Ruskulis.
After attracting more and more forces to the border, people smugglers are taking migrants further and further inland, as far as twenty or thirty kilometers from the border. Now their onward route often leads no longer south to Germany, but north towards Estonia, Finland, and Sweden.
Those involved in securing the illegal migration route come from different regions of the world – the Middle East, Asia, even South America – this summer there have been smugglers from Colombia.
As aggression from criminals increases, border guards are also concerned about their safety and want their rights to use service weapons to be regulated and simplified in law.
Two years ago, Lithuania filed a complaint against Belarus with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and in March of this year, it officially launched a judicial investigation into crimes against humanity committed by the Belarusian regime, including the instrumentalization of migrants.
An article written by Inga Šņore (Latvian Television), initially published on 26 October 2026, 08:14 (CET)