WARSAW (Reuters) – The Polish foreign ministry summoned the Belarusian charge d’affaires over the expulsion of a Polish diplomat from Belarus, it said on Wednesday.
Tensions have been running high between the neighbours over a migrant crisis that the European Union and Poland say was engineered by Belarus, a charge Minsk denies. Warsaw also accuses President Alexander Lukashenko’s government of oppressing Belarus’s small Polish ethnic minority.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirms the fact that the (Belarusian) charge d’affaires was called in in a case related to the expulsion of a Polish consul,” spokesman Lukasz Jasina said in a statement. “At this stage, steps are being taken to verify the information provided and to clarify the situation.”
Jasina said the expelled diplomat was the Polish consul in the border city of Brest.
The Belarusian foreign ministry could not immediately be reached for comment.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish in Warsaw and Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv; Editing by Alex Richardson and Gareth Jones)
