It was chaos at the border. Thousands of refugees and migrants from the Middle East had gathered at the crossing point to the European Union, hoping for a better life. Many had been taken to the barbed wire fence in state-funded buses, after the authoritarian leader followed through on years-old threats to “open the doors to Europe”. But when people arrived, hope for a better life was met with tear gas from the police and stun grenades.

It was not a scene from the Polish-Belarusian border this week, but from Greece’s land border with Turkey less than two years ago.

Authoritarian Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has realized – as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan knew before him – that desperate people fleeing war and violence can be used as pawns in a cruel political game. The game can be played because the EU wants at all costs to exclude irregular migrants, even if it means outsourcing border security to repressive regimes.

“Lukashenko is using the only language he understands – force – to try to reopen dialogue with the EU,” wrote Maxim Samorukov of the Carnegie Center in Moscow. But the plan failed. Poland, which has banned media, NGOs and even EU officials from crossing its border with Belarus, has refused to allow migrants to enter. Migrants found shivering in thin blankets in no man’s land said they were figuratively kicked like a soccer ball, neither allowed to enter Poland, nor return to Belarus. Further north, Lithuania would adopt similar tactics along its 420-mile border with Belarus.

If Lukashenko expected Poland and Lithuania to come under heavy criticism for their treatment of people – and the reopening of divisions within the EU – he was wrong.

Six years after the migration crisis, when a million asylum seekers entered the European Union, the doors of the EU are hermetically closed. While outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel was widely praised for her humanitarian gesture of welcoming Syrian asylum seekers in 2015, most EU officials learned a different lesson: She was wrong. The combination of “wir schaffen das (we can do it) without any consultation … and [mandatory] quotas “to redistribute refugees across the bloc was a mistake, a former senior EU official told The Guardian.

The second lesson the EU learned from 2015 was that it needed a stronger external border. In 2021, the speech in Brussels is about the walls, not wir schaffen das. “We’re really in a different place than five years ago. We have to realize that in some parts of the world physical barriers are a necessity, ”said a senior diplomat from the large group of EU member states advocating for common funding of external walls and fences.

On the contrary, in the short term, the crisis strengthened the unity of the EU at a time when the Polish nationalist government was under scrutiny for undermining the rule of law. During a recent visit to Warsaw, which could have been dominated by the ongoing assault on independent Polish justice, European Council President Charles Michel said that Poland was facing a major crisis at its border: “This is a crisis that we are taking seriously, and which calls for both solidarity and unity across the European Union.

The tone was similar when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited the Greek-Turkish border in March 2020, praising Greece as Europe’s “shield”. A decade earlier, the EU was negotiating with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was playing on EU fears, demanding billions to prevent people from crossing the Mediterranean in small boats. Since 2017, the EU has been funding the Libyan Coast Guard, paying them to intercept people in the Mediterranean, despite knowledge of widespread human rights violations and unexplained disappearances of returnees.

But there are some important differences between Turkey, Libya and Belarus. Turkey has hosted more than 4 million refugees, securing the EU’s pledge to spend € 6 billion on aid. Libya has for many years been a gateway for people from all over Africa seeking to travel to Europe. More than these states, Belarus has fabricated the crisis, with reports of state-backed travel agencies offering visa-hotel packages with false promises of a short walk to the EU border from Minsk. (The distance is about 200 miles).

Lukashenko, however, seems unlikely to win anything. Instead of opening up with the EU, he unleashed a new round of sanctions against his regime, with the promise of tougher measures to come.

As diplomatic wrangling continues, thousands of people are trapped in no man’s land on the EU’s eastern border, as winter temperatures drop.

Diplomats say they want to help organize repatriation flights, but only from Belarus, not from the EU. As the humanitarian crisis intensifies, there will be no loophole in Fortress Europe.