US Secretary of State John Kerry is going to London today to discuss the situation in the Middle East. Later he will visit Berlin and meet the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier to discuss the biggest migration crisis in Europe since the period of World War II.
Sergey Demidenko, Associate Professor of the Institute of Social Sciences of RANHiGS, points out an obvious split in the European community on the migration issue: “The countries that receive migrants, such as Hungary and Greece, strongly support the idea of limiting this flow in any way and are in favor of somehow quickly getting rid of these migrants. There is nothing surprising in the fact that the migrants themselves are reluctant to stay in Hungary and Greece and try to follow in transit to Germany where, correspondingly, quite good opportunities for social adaptation have been created.”
At the same time, according to Demidenko, the problem will probably affect Russia: “A corridor has already been laid by these migrants; in the Western press, in particular, several articles about it have already appeared. These articles are based on interviews with participants of these events. The route is laid through different travel agencies, when a Russian visa is being bought. Migrants enter Russia with a tourist visa and then go to Murmansk, and from Murmansk to the Norwegian border, and they cross the Norwegian border on bicycles.”
The expert is afraid that this route can be followed not only by ordinary civilians fleeing from war, but also by people who are quite tightly integrated into those Islamic structures. “Today's situation, which is prevailing in Syria and Iraq, usually, in the global information space, is exclusively discussed in the context of the existence of Islamic State, the 'Islamic Caliphate', i.e. they set much larger and more ambitious goals for themselves. Besides ISIS, there are many various Islamist structures, less important, perhaps, than Islamic State, but no less dangerous. There is Dzhabhat en-Nusra, various Islamist structures integrated into the Syrian Free Army and so on. In other words, it is very hard to control this entire conglomerate. And through this route these people can flow into Russia. It is a danger, of course, for our North Caucasus and Russian Muslim regions.”
