Revealed: how Putin plans to flood West with migrants
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Russia is using private militias to control and “weaponise” immigration into Europe, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Kremlin has influence over a number of the main routes into the continent and border police are warning that, with the arrival of spring, Russia is likely to “intensify” its efforts to move migrants.
It has been widely feared that Vladimir Putin is using the tactic to destabilise Europe.
The Telegraph has now seen intelligence documents detailing plans for Russian agents to set up a “15,000-man strong border police force” comprising former militias in Libya to control the flow of migrants.
A security source said: “If you can control the migrant routes into Europe then you can effectively control elections, because you can restrict or flood a certain area with migrants in order to influence public opinion at a crucial time.”
It comes as migration is set to be a key issue in the general election.
A failure to control the number of migrants coming to the UK is already seen as a major weakness for Rishi Sunak, who is struggling to push through a scheme to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda to stop the flow of small boats across the Channel.
In the year to June 2023, 52,530 illegal migrants were recorded as entering the UK, up 17 per cent on the previous year. Most of these crossed the Channel in small boats.
Figures released on Thursday revealed that the number of people granted asylum in the UK hit a record high in 2023 as officials waved through thousands of applications in an attempt to clear a huge post-pandemic backlog.
A surge of migrants into Europe this winter prompted by Putin could lead to an increase in small boats crossing this summer, when people smugglers make use of the better weather to send people across the Channel, putting Mr Sunak under further pressure.
Frontex, the EU’s border police, says it has seen Russia using migration “as a lever in a larger game of influence and pressure”.
The agency is warning that an increasingly isolated Putin choosing to move migrants to Europe’s doorstep – both along Russia’s eastern borders and through proxies in the south, including in Africa – is a major threat to security for 2024.
It comes amid growing tensions between Russia and the West, with Putin using his annual state of the nation speech on Thursday to warn that he will use nuclear weapons if Nato countries send troops into Ukraine.
The president told the Kremlin that “strategic nuclear forces” were “in a state of full readiness for guaranteed use” and boots on the ground could lead to “the destruction of civilisation”.
Mercenaries including the Wagner group have been fuelling migration by increasing instability and violence in parts of Africa under their control and by physically moving migrants to the borders and supporting smugglers, experts say.
Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, told The Telegraph: “The UK’s adversaries are weaponising the flow of people in Europe’s near abroad, as we witnessed on the border between Belarus and Poland and Lithuania in 2021, and exacerbating instability in the Maghreb and Sahel region through the use of proxies.”
The warning has been echoed by ministers across Europe.
Russia’s plans to set up a Libyan militia, as seen by The Telegraph, fell through when payments due to be made via the “the Russian-Libyan cultural institute” in Moscow were never made. No record of such a company exists.
However, thousands of Wagner mercenaries have been fighting in Libya’s civil war since at least 2019 for Russia ally General Khalifa Haftar, and the group has a stronghold in the region.
Antonio Tajani, Italy’s deputy prime minister, has said that Rome has intelligence that the mercenaries “are very active and in contact with trafficking gangs and militia interested in migrant smuggling”.
His government has blamed a surge in the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean on Wagner, whom they accuse of waging “hybrid warfare”.
The largest increase in migrants last year was through that central Mediterranean route, according to Frontex, which noted that at 380,000, the number of irregular border crossings in 2023 was at its highest since 2016.
Women and children accounted for only 20 per cent of the total, the data show.
Frontex recorded more than 62,000 onward crossings toward the UK.
Amid growing tensions over the conflict between Israel and Gaza, Russia has also been strengthening its ties with Tunisia, another major source of migrants into the central Mediterranean.
Russian mercenaries are already known to be active across Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Mali and Sudan.
Dr Sergey Sukhankin, a senior fellow at The Jamestown Foundation and an adviser at Gulf State Analytics in Washington, said that observers tended to focus on Russian paramilitaries’ role in propping up African regimes, and not on the impact on migration.
“If we take a look at their map, you will see that the Central African Republic holds a strategic place, which gives the Russian paramilitaries inroads to Sudan, which is another key player, and then on to the smugglers’ route through to Libya,” he said.
“The migration routes are inseparable from the localities and places where the Wagner Group and other Russian paramilitaries are present.
“The various waves of illegal migrants from Africa might increase, because Russia is planning to create a new military facility in the Central African Republic. I think the capacity is about 2,000 men so this will give Russia additional leverage in terms of navigating those migration flows from the Sub-Saharan Africa region on to Libya and then on to the European Union.”
In its latest risk report, Frontex warns: “Given the extent of hostility between Russia and the West and the reduced interdependence between them, the likelihood of the instrumentalisation of migrants by Russia and Belarus has increased.
“Importantly, the instrumentalisation of migrants may not only be limited to the eastern land borders as Russia’s allies and proxies to the south and south-east could be leveraged.”
EU law defines “instrumentalisation of migrants” as a situation where another country “instigates irregular migratory flows… by actively encouraging or facilitating the movement” of migrants to the borders in order to “destabilise” the EU or a member including putting at risk “its territorial integrity, the maintenance of law and order or the safeguard of its national security”.
The European Parliament is in the process of passing an “emergency migration and asylum management procedure” to deal with the “highly worrying phenomenon” of “the increasing role of state actors in artificially creating and facilitating irregular migration, using migratory flows as a tool for political purposes”.
It started taking action in 2021 after Belarusian leader and close Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko sent thousands of migrants from the Middle East into the EU by inviting people – mainly in Iraq – to fly to Minsk and then bussing them to the heavily forested border with Poland and telling them to walk across.
Frontex officers were deployed to Finland in November when the country was forced to close several of its border crossings with Russia after seeing a dramatic spike in the number of migrants without proper visas and documentation, mostly from the Middle East and Africa.
Elina Valtonen, the Finnish foreign minister, said that it was “undoubtedly” Russia using migration as “hybrid warfare” and in some cases it was “actively helping” migrants to travel to the border.
A Frontex spokesman told The Telegraph: “These developments illustrate broader strategies that seem to be employed by state actors like Russia and Belarus, aimed at stress-testing the resilience of borders shared with EU and Schengen countries.
“This is not just a matter of border security but also of geopolitical tension, where migration is used as a lever in a larger game of influence and pressure. It is disturbing to see the desperation of people seeking to come to the EU used ruthlessly as pawns in a geopolitical game.
“While these incidents in Finland are currently at a relatively contained scale, they signal a potential risk that could intensify, particularly with the arrival of spring – a period traditionally associated with increased migratory movements.
“The situation could further escalate if there is active facilitation of crossings by the authorities in question.”
