The migrant crisis on the European Union's borders with Belarus is an "unprecedented challenge" to the bloc which pits democracy against autocracy, according to Med-Or Foundation president and former Italian interior minister Marco Minniti.
"Europe is facing an unprecedented challenge and has reacted by revealing all its fragility and fears, and above all the lack of shared vision on the question of migration," Minniti wrote on Tuesday in an editorial for La Repubblica daily.
Poland - the EU country whose border thousands of Middle Eastern migrants have allegedly been allowed to reach by Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko - must not be left to handle the crisis alone, Minniti underlined.
"If we have a regime that is deliberately taking hostages, the very first thing to do is to free them, welcome them and create the conditions - including through tough negotiations - to ensure there will be no blackmail or hostage-taking in future," Minniti wrote.
"Poland should not be left on its own, while at the same time it should be made clear that building fences would be a grave error."
Poland has accused Belarus of continuing to truck migrants and refugees to its border despite clearing camps close to the frontier earlier this week. Some 10 migrants are believed to have died with winter setting in.
"It is not the first time in history that an authoritarian regime has with cynical 'realpolitik' used a humanitarian crisis to weaken its internal and external enemies at put them on the back foot," Minniti wrote.
"The drama playing out in the Bialowieza forest is much more than this. This time the humanitarian crisis has been planned by a sovereign state."
Minsk rejects EU accusations that it is deliberately trying flood the bloc with migrants and refugees in retaliation for its sanctions against Belarus following the widely discredited presidential polls last year and Lukashenko's violent crackdown against opposition protestors.
"We don't know whether Russia is lurking in the shadows behind Belarus. Putin, historic 'lord and protector' of Lukashenko, denies this," Minniti stated, referring to Russia's president Vladmir Putin.
"In recent days it has been established with reasonable certainty, however, that Russian troop numbers have increased at the border with Ukraine," Minniti went on.
"Is this a mere coincidence or two aspects of the same political operation?" he asked.
The only certainty is Russia's historical strategic competition with Europe in two major areas: the Mediterranean and Eurasia, Minniti argued.
"This is a modern-day strategy of tension and pressure. Not with the objective of an open conflict, which no one wants, but rather to achieve a progressive 'alteration of the balance of power'," Minniti claimed.
"What today seems impossible and unacceptable can become possible, and, above all, acceptable tomorrow."
Such an approach is common to European and Asian autocracies which nonetheless have "varying designs and geopolitical interests," Minniti pointed out.
