Polish soldiers looking for love have popped up on Belarusian Tinder to the surprise of locals. Due to the close proximity of approximately 12,000 troops stationed along the frontier between the two countries, the dating app has picked up the profiles of the young men mainly in their twenties.
Posting on Twitter one Belarusian woman said: “This is what Tinder looks like now, if you are a girl in Grodno. It’s not funny”, before attaching a screenshot showing seven hopefuls dressed in fatigues. One of the profiles was also of a Belarusian soldier.
Grodno, a city in western Belarus with a population of around 369,000 people, is 24km from the border with Poland where over 2,000 migrants – mostly from the Middle East – are trapped amid rising tensions between Belarus’s strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko and the European Union, of which Poland is a member.
Since the summer Lukashenko has been using the hopes of some of the world’s most desperate people to punish the EU for sanctions imposed on his country after the widely discredited elections in August 2020 and the subsequent crackdown on opposition protests.
On Monday, hundreds of people approached the Kuźnica checkpoint on the Belarusian side of the border in the hopes of being allowed safe passage to Europe. Conditions for people caught between the two countries are quickly deteriorating as temperatures plummet at night and more people arrive from the Belarusian capital, Minsk.
Poland has taken a hardline stance on migration and has sealed the Kuźnica checkpoint. Those who have managed to make it across into EU territory have often been pushed back to Belarus by Polish border police contrary to international rules on asylum.
The country has also rejected help from the EU border agency, Frontex, a move which signals its determination to deal with this crisis on its own terms.
