Soldiers fix the razor wire to contain migrants at the Poland-Belarus border. Photo / AP
Russia has dispatched nuclear-capable bombers to patrol Belarusian airspace in a rare show of force as Moscow demanded the European Union take in thousands of migrants camped on its borders.
The two supersonic warplanes were scrambled over Belarus to test the country's missile defence shields, the Russian defence ministry said, amid a worsening migrant crisis on the bloc's frontier.
The move marked a dramatic escalation in the stand-off between the EU, Minsk and Moscow, with Polish authorities battling to contain some 4000 migrants camped on its border with Belarus.
Asylum-seekers from Iraq and other countries first started to arrive at the EU's doorstep in the summer, a few weeks after Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, threatened to "flood" Europe with migrants in retaliation to Western sanctions for brutally cracking down on protests at home.
Poland has accused Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, of orchestrating the crisis from behind the scenes and using Belarus as a proxy to "rebuild the Russian empire".
After the flyover by the pair of Tu-22M3 nuclear jets, the Russian military said such manoeuvres would become more frequent in response to the "ongoing situation both in the air and on the ground."
The Polish defence ministry on Wednesday posted a video apparently showing Belarusian security forces firing a warning shot into the air in an attempt to intimidate a crowd of migrants standing by the border fence.
As the shot rings out, the crowd, which contains women and children, screams.
Polish authorities also reported the arrests of three people including a Russian national suspected of human trafficking.
An Iraqi man told an independent Belarusian news outlet that the asylum seekers were trapped at the frontier, with no way to progress to Poland or go back to Belarus.
"We can't stay in Belarus because the Belarusian border guards are using force to get us to go to Poland," the man, identified as Amir, told Zerkalo.
He said he had been at the camp for two days and had no idea how long he would have to stay.
Meanwhile several dozen people, predominantly young men from Iraq, shared live video of themselves on Facebook from outside a shopping centre in Minsk, showing backpacks and sleeping bags ready for their journey to the Polish border.
In a bid to end the conflict, Angela Merkel, the departing German chancellor, called on President Putin on Wednesday to intervene with Belarus.
The exploitation of migrants "against the European Union by the Belarusian regime is inhuman and completely unacceptable", her office said she told Putin during a call, urging him to "exert his influence" on Lukashenko.
But Russia instead blamed the EU for the crisis, accusing Brussels of trying to "strangle" Minsk by closing off the frontier.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told a news conference he hoped Europeans would "not allow themselves to be drawn into a spiral that is fairly dangerous".
"It is apparent that a humanitarian catastrophe is looming against the background of Europeans' reluctance to demonstrate commitment to their European values," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a separate briefing.
It comes as the European Union considers a U-turn in its opposition to funding border walls to stem the flow of migration.
Charles Michel, the European Council's president, has vowed to open a debate on EU-funded fences, in an apparent break with Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission's president, who last month insisted the bloc would not pay for "barbed wire or walls".
Michel yesterday met with Mateusz Marawiecki, the Polish prime minister, in a show of "solidarity" with Poland.
"Hybrid attacks against the EU must stop," he tweeted after the meeting.
EU ambassadors also agreed to broaden sanctions against Belarus, with a raft of new individuals and companies likely to be added to a blacklist next week.