The number of Belarusians coming to Lithuania has been going down over the last few months, as businesses have been shifting their focus and inviting employees from other countries, Evelina Gudzinskaitė, head of Lithuania’s Migration Department, has said.
“I could say that the scale of Belarusian citizens coming to Lithuania has slightly decreased over the last few months, that is, the pace at which their number is increasing in Lithuania has slowed down a bit, compared to the beginning of last year,” Gudzinskaitė told LRT RADIO on Monday.
“I think this is because of the whole environment and the fact that businesses are, first of all, making a shift towards lower-risk workers from other countries, such as Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan,” she added.
In her words, Belarusians are discouraged from coming to Lithuania and are also filtered out by the checks carried out by the Migration Department in cooperation with the State Security Department (VSD).
According to the Migration Department, there were 224,800 foreigners living in Lithuania at the beginning of this month, including some 62,500 Belarusians.
The Migration Department and the VSD are tasked with carrying out more thorough checks on Belarusian nationals who have obtained or are applying for a temporary residence permit in Lithuania on the basis of employment. More stringent checks come after Alexander Matiyevich, a former Belarusian police major who took part in the crackdown on pro-democracy protests in his country, obtained a temporary residence permit in Lithuania.
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In early February, the VSD said the majority of migrants from Belarus were economic migrants, and only a fraction of Belarusians living in Lithuania were involved in various opposition activities.
“This opens up opportunities for Belarusian intelligence services to expand their activities and to exploit persons favourable to the regime against the interests of Lithuania,” it stated.
The VSD said it had carried out 121,577 threat assessments of foreigners last year and submitted conclusions on 1,415 persons, notifying the Migration Department that their residence in Lithuania posed a threat to state security. Around 80 percent of these persons are Belarusian citizens and most of them are linked to the Lukashenko regime.
According to the VSD, some 60 percent of the Belarusians whose life in Lithuania poses a threat to national security, used to work for the Belarusian state institutions, about 30 percent used to serve in the army, and up to 10 percent used to work for the military industry or at other strategic sites.
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