Putin sent the most refugees to Europe in the last decade, said the European Commissioner

“It’s always Putin. Always,” said European Commissioner for Migration Magnus Brunner. He pointed to the support that the Russian president gave to his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad throughout the civil war that broke out in 2011. According to the Financial Times, he recalled that it triggered the migration crisis in Europe between 2015 and 2016, when more than two million people applied for asylum on the continent.

Putin’s military support enabled Assad to stay in power and prolong the civil war, which drove more and more Syrians abroad. In the end, even the dictator himself became a refugee. When his regime fell at the end of 2024, he and his family fled to Russia.

The second migration influx in the last ten years included Ukrainians. “And again, Vladimir Putin was the cause,” said Brunner in connection with the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then, approximately 4.3 million Ukrainians have received temporary protection in the EU.

According to Brunner, the Russian president also has a role in the current war in Iran, even if Russia did not start it. “The regime there also supports it,” said the European Commissioner. “And the whole situation there can result in a giant wave of migration,” he continued. “This leads me to a clear conclusion: the biggest supplier of migrants to Europe is Putin,” he said.

Unlike in 2015, when former German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed refugees from Syria, European countries now want to prevent a large-scale influx of migrants as a result of the war in the Middle East triggered by the US-Israeli strikes on Iran. According to Brunner, “at the moment we don’t see any floods of people from Iran, but of course we have to be vigilant because the situation can change every day.”

Several EU countries, led by Italy and Denmark, are promoting stricter measures, including closing borders, to prevent the arrival of people from the Middle East and thus avert a situation similar to the Syrian crisis. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni warned in a joint letter that “we cannot risk a repeat of the migration flows to the EU that we witnessed in 2015 and 2016.”

Both Prime Ministers called on the European Commission to “investigate mechanisms that could function as an emergency brake activated in the event of sudden large-scale migration movements to the EU”.

“These could include closing the bloc’s borders in case of security threats,” said an unnamed EU diplomat according to the Financial Times. EU countries have done this in the past, for example when Russia and Belarus pushed migrants across the border into Poland. At the time, non-governmental human rights organizations such as Amnesty International sharply criticized the measure. It was mainly about Poland, which last year suspended the acceptance of asylum applications at the Belarusian border. But Warsaw resisted.

The EU is now “much better prepared than ten years ago”, Bruner said, referring to asylum procedures carried out directly at the borders and new biometric border controls, which are gradually coming into force in individual countries of the bloc. Of the 40 million people from outside the EU who registered for entry since October last year, roughly 19,000 were rejected. “There were approximately 500 of them who posed a security threat,” added Brunner.