Dozens of migrants have been reported by their families as missing. A small team of volunteers in Lithuania is combing through forests and swamps on the border trying to find them.
Mantautas Šulskus has been a leading member of Sienos Grupė (Border Group) since the very beginning. Their first call to action came in the summer of 2021 when the Belarusian regime opened a migration corridor in response to sanctions.
Thousands headed to the forests separating the European Union from Belarus. Many of them made it across, but thousands were detained and deported, while dozens have been found dead or were reported missing.
Most of the cases happened in what observers call a game of “ping-pong” between the Belarusian, Polish and Baltic border guards. Once in the forest, the migrants are pushed back and forth from one side to the other, trapping them there for days or weeks, sometimes leading to amputation of limbs and deaths due to hypothermia and frostbite.
But since 2021, the migration flow in Lithuania has decreased to a trickle, with most reported cases of attempted crossings now centred on the border with Belarus in Latvia and Poland. In the latter, a recent incident saw a migrant stab and kill a Polish guard in the first reported case of violence directed not toward migrants, but the other way around.
The forests in Lithuania are eerily quiet. Both Poland and Lithuania had built extensive border walls, but only the Polish side had seen the return of large-scale migrant groups.
“We find abandoned things, bags. We think they are at the collection points of people smugglers. Now we only get help messages from migrants in Latvia, none from Lithuania,” said Dangira, a volunteer at the Sienos Grupė leading the day’s hike.
As before the border crisis with Belarus, most illicit activity focuses on tobacco, not people, smuggling. Criminal networks are now using drones extensively to fly boxes of cheap Belarusian cigarettes across the border.
“We found a number of x-signs sprayed on the grass, maybe they are there to guide the drones of [cigarette] smugglers? We don’t know, but it’s interesting,” Dangira added.
So the volunteers continue walking the migration paths in the Lithuanian forests, seeking to find evidence enough to establish a trail of the missing.
“Sometimes it seems there is no point when we set off on a hike, but you never know what will happen. Once we pointed at a location on a map, went there, and subsequently found the grave of one of the three dead migrants,” said Šulskus. “We find meaning in this lottery.”
It’s also a chance to train new volunteers, most of whom have joined in recent months. Only several veterans of the 2021 emergency are still part of the group – once the urgency of the situation had disappeared, they also scaled down their involvement.
Unsolved disappearances
Six people are still considered active cases, which involves their relatives continuing to search their whereabouts.
Their last locations are normally reported in Lithuania – either told themselves via messages to their families, or the last GPS pins or messages sent from their phones.
However, this is normally not enough for institutions to launch a missing person's search. Only once, the group found a bag containing a person's ID, which was enough to start a case. It is still ongoing, Šulskus said.
“Since June 1, 2021, we have received a total of 121 requests for missing persons, which included 103 people who disappeared while moving through Lithuania or on the border between Belarus and Lithuania, but it is not known which side," said Aušrinė Gogelytė, a member of Sienos Group responsible for missing persons. “Most of the cases have now been solved – they were short-term disappearances, arrests, pushbacks, or people were able to reconnect with their families after leaving the forest or being admitted to hospital.”
“One of the missing persons was found dead in Lithuania and another in Belarus. Two more were found in Latvia, we helped identify them,” added Gogelytė. This information was not independently verified by LRT.lt.
As part of their work, Sienos Grupė cooperates with other volunteers in Poland, and Latvia, as well as Human Constanta, a Belarusian human rights organisation in exile.
“A relative contacted us again and said he had been informed by a medical institution that the son's body was found in Belarus,” said Gogelytė. “I then contacted Human Constanta and found out that this was the first time a family was informed of their relative's death – not by an institution, but by a person in the hospital who managed to contact the family himself.”
What they can do now is to gather enough evidence for the Lithuanian authorities to launch a search and a pre-trial investigation for the remaining missing persons.
“It is difficult to know how many unidentified corpses [of migrants] there are because some of them are Lithuanian. Even before the migration crisis, every year unidentified corpses are found in Lithuania – without personal documents, without relatives, so they remain unidentified,” said Šulskus. “In recent years, perhaps some of them are foreigners. It is difficult to find out because until there is an official investigation there is no reason for [the authorities] to provide information.”
“Some of those missing migrants may have already been found, but we don't know,” added Šulskus.
It should be possible, at least in theory, to connect some of those cases and provide answers to the families of the missing, he added.
“We asked municipalities for statistics about unidentified bodies. Some of them were found in Vilnius, others in Kaunas and Klaipėda. But, for example, one was found in the Varėna district [near the Belarusian border]. It is hard to believe that no one in the village would recognise the person, so it was likely a migrant.”
In a recent DELFI documentary, local administrations in Lithuania’s border zone failed to respond, said they had no data on migrant deaths, or referred the reporters back to the State Border Guard Service (VSAT).
VSAT told LRT.lt they were aware of two migrant deaths on the border with Belarus – one in 2021 and another in 2022. “All other information does not correspond to reality,” said Giedrius Mišutis, the service’s spokesperson.
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