BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke again with Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko on Wednesday, stressing the need to let the United Nations and the European Commission provide aid to migrants stranded at Belarus’s border with Poland.
“Chancellor Merkel spoke again with Mr Lukashenko,” her spokesperson wrote on Twitter. “She stressed the need, with the support of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organisation for Migration and the cooperation of the European Commission, to provide humanitarian aid and repatriation facilities to the affected people.”
As in the statement following Monday’s phone call, spokesperson Steffen Seibert made no reference to Lukashenko being Belarus’s President, referring to him purely as “Mr Lukashenko”. Germany and most western countries do not recognise the victory he claimed in last August’s election.
Belarus said the pair had come to “an understanding” in the call.
“Having discussed the refugees issue in depth, the parties came to a certain understanding on how to act and move further in solving the existing issues,” BelTa state news agency quoted Lukashenko’s press office as saying.
Lukashenko and Merkel agreed that the EU and officials from Belarus officials would talks as soon as possible, BelTa said.
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt in Berlin and Andrey Osroukh in Moscow; Editing by Madeline Chambers)
