By Aistė Valiauskaitė, Aina Mizgirdė, LRT TV, LRT.lt.

Lithuania’s incoming Interior Minister Martynas Katelynas has not ruled out temporarily reintroducing border controls with Latvia as the number of migrants arriving from Belarus via Latvia continues to increase. Compared with the first half of last year, secondary migration from Latvia has risen fourfold.

Last weekend, Polish authorities found 27 migrants who had attempted to cross the border irregularly in a lorry travelling from Latvia through Lithuania. It was just one of many such cases.
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Poland has been carrying out checks on travellers arriving from Lithuania and Germany for the past year. Katelynas said Lithuania could also begin checking people crossing its border with Latvia.
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“That would, of course, be the ‘nuclear option’. But if we had no other way to manage the flow and stop migrants at the border rather than on our territory, I think we would have to do it. I very much hope it will not come to that,” the incoming interior minister said.
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According to Katelynas, whether border controls are introduced will depend on migrant flows and on the capacity of border guards.

Read more: LRT.LT