In the summer of 2021, Belarus began systematically pushing people, mostly from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, towards the borders of Lithuania and Poland. The Lukashenko government, retaliating against EU sanctions, facilitated the entry of migrants and asylum seekers and directed them towards the ‘European Frontier’, in what European authorities quickly labelled a “hybrid attack.” Lithuania declared a state of emergency. Its parliament amended legislation to formally legalise “pushbacks”, the illegal forcible return of people across the border without any asylum process. Proposals emerged to arm civilian border patrols, and with the added context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine there have since even been calls to lay landmines along the same border, exacerbating the state of alarm and mistrust. By the time irregular crossings declined into 2022, Lithuania had constructed one of the most restrictive border regimes in the EU. Lithuania has maintained emergency-level border powers continuously since 2021, with the legal framework for pushbacks and restricted civil society access enshrined in legislation that remains on the books.
The crisis, despite involving a relatively small number of people on the move, produced a political consensus that was striking even by European standards. A humanitarian volunteer interviewed in the course of research for this project reported that a radio poll taken during the height of the crisis, following a debate between a migrant advocacy group and the interior minister, found that 93% of respondents supported illegal pushbacks, aligning with reports of intense anti-migrant hostility in the country. Only 4–5% backed the volunteers[1].
Those volunteers were members of Sienos Grupė, Lithuanian for The Border Group, a small, non-hierarchical network of Lithuanian and foreign-born volunteers that formed spontaneously in response to the unfolding crisis and reports of people dying in the forests along the border. What began as a protest group expanded into an emergency hotline, a direct aid operation, a critical source of independent data to counter hegemonic state narratives, and eventually a widely recognised advocacy organisation, without ever stopping the work that started it all: going into the forest at night with food, water, and medical supplies to people trapped between armed guards on both sides, in treacherous terrain and potentially lethal conditions. For this principled humanitarian intervention, they were labelled agents of Lukashenko, fake volunteers, frauds, perverts, and, eventually, human traffickers. A pre-trial investigation was launched by the Prosecutor General’s Office. Senior government officials accused them of anti-State activities and people trafficking, without evidence of course.
Lithuania is an EU member, bound by the 1951 Refugee Convention, the ICCPR, and the full architecture of post-war international human rights law. What happened there is not an aberration, it is “Fortress Europe” operating as designed, through the systematic criminalisation of solidarity, the delegitimisation of those who refuse to look away, and the construction of humanitarianism itself as a threat to the nation. The Lithuanian border was one node in an accelerating continental project of exclusion, where the violence is increasingly legal, the consensus increasingly broad, and the space for dissent increasingly narrow. And yet resistance persisted, punching well above its weight. Despite some successes, the Lithuanian border crisis is a record of ongoing abuses, deaths, amputations, sexual violence, and systematic state brutality that continues today, among EU complicity. But within that grim landscape, it illustrates something important, how a principled, under-resourced group acting in solidarity can shift national public discourse, challenge official narratives, and hold power to account in ways that larger, better-funded institutions often failed to or chose not to. An understanding of this has implications for humanitarian crisis responses and autonomous modes of border resistance well beyond Lithuania.
Solidarity Pathologised
The vilification of migrant advocates in Lithuania followed a recognisable script. Advocates were morally pathologised. A Red Cross volunteer who publicly criticised Lithuania’s border policies described being accused of volunteering in migrant camps for “filthy motivation”, as though care for people of a different ethnicity, racialised by EU borders, could only be explained by sexual deviance. Such rhetoric performs a specific function: it extends the dehumanisation of migrants onto those who support them, removing both groups from the space of legitimate political concern. In the Lithuanian case this logic moved rapidly from the fringes into official government communication. Deputy Interior Minister Lančinskas accused Sienos Grupė of “anti-State activities.” The National Security and Defence Committee chair alleged involvement in people trafficking, a baseless and politically-motivated attack. These were senior state officials using parliamentary platforms to delegitimise civil society actors doing documented humanitarian work. This was reflected widely in media coverage, and not confined to political elites. Volunteers and journalists reported encountering the same accusations in everyday interactions, from neighbours, colleagues, and strangers, reflecting how thoroughly the hostile narrative saturated public discourse.
The effect, compounded by overwhelming public support for pushbacks, was a climate of self-censorship and attrition. Volunteers described reducing their public presence, depoliticising their framing, downplaying calls for systemic change in favour of purely humanitarian language, a pattern sociologists Maestri and Monforte have termed “soft repression“, describing the everyday social pressure that slowly erodes political will. One interviewee described having to “censor myself very heavily” even among friends, unable to touch the subjects of migrants without social reprisal. Journalists covering the crisis faced comparable pressures, subject to abuse, threats, and public vilification for reporting that challenged the dominant security narrative, while simultaneously being denied physical access to the border zone, where a state of emergency effectively excluded media professionals alongside NGOs. Indeed, cases like this one suggest that the state does not need to win every legal confrontation to achieve its aims. It needs only to make advocacy and humanitarian intervention exhausting, isolating, and personally costly, until those involved quietly withdraw.
The Access Trap: The Limitations of State Sanctioned Intervention
When the crisis erupted, well-resourced international organisations arrived: the Red Cross, UNHCR, Caritas. Their support was genuine and indispensable, including food distribution, detention monitoring, and legal training. But their position contained a structural contradiction that the Lithuanian crisis exposed with clarity. Maintaining access to migrant populations requires maintaining cooperative relationships with the state that controls that access. This creates a built-in disincentive to confront those same authorities publicly, as access can be restricted or denied at will.
The limits of this arrangement were laid bare in particularly stark fashion when a psychologist employed by the Red Cross was accused of sexually abusing detained asylum seekers. The Lithuanian state’s response was instructive: rather than treating this as an isolated safeguarding failure, authorities used it as a pretext to impose a new rule requiring border guards to accompany all NGO staff during meetings with detainees. The effect was to make confidential psychological and medical support, functionally impossible. An abuse of vulnerable people in state custody became, in the state’s hands, a justification for reducing the oversight and support available to those same people. It was a manoeuvre that served the interests of the institution responsible for their detention far more than those of the detainees themselves. This was among the conditions that shaped MSF’s eventual decision to withdraw. In January 2023, MSF closed its Lithuanian and Latvian operations after eighteen months, citing restrictions that made it impossible to provide care in accordance with humanitarian principles. They had documented over 8,000 pushbacks. Closure was an acknowledgement that operating within the available terms was no longer compatible with their mandate, as a direct result of state repression.
Later reports from Sienos Grupė volunteers were revealing. MSF, with its global profile, institutional resources, and dedicated legal department, had been unofficially coordinating with Sienos Grupė via Telegram. That such coordination occurred at all says something significant about where effective resistance can and does emerge under conditions of state-imposed desperation.
The Sienos Grupė Model
Sienos Grupė formed in summer 2021, inspired by its Polish counterpart Grupa Granica. It has no formal hierarchy, no institutional registration that could be threatened, no funding model that could be withdrawn. Members are recruited based on available skills; decisions are made collectively and ad hoc. One member described it: “whoever had the skills to do something, did. We worked with rather ad hoc methods to solve problems.” This informality emerged naturally from the conditions of working under state and wider societal hostility, and proved to have certain design advantages.
The group, with around 45 members with varying levels of involvement, pursues three core activities: direct humanitarian aid to people in the forest; monitoring and documentation of pushbacks and state violence; and engagement with local border communities. These three strands reinforce each other. The documentation produced independent data that repeatedly forced the Ministry of Interior to revise its official narrative. One volunteer put it directly: “We are the only ones with any kind of accurate statistics about the situation. Our information has repeatedly challenged the Ministry of the Interior, forcing them to shift their narrative closer to reality.” This dynamic distinguished Sienos Grupė from a purely humanitarian operation. From early on in the crisis, they understood documentation as a political act, a claim on the border as a site of contestation rather than an immovable fact of state sovereignty[2]. The same evidence that helped reconnect separated families also formed the basis of legal challenges, as well as ammunition for critical journalists to challenge hegemonic narratives. Prior to their intervention, restrictions on border access otherwise meant that all border-related information came from state security forces. By transforming fieldwork into admissible legal evidence, they supported and in some cases directly facilitated lawsuits concerning illegal pushbacks, human rights abuses, and unconstitutional treatment. Their work moved between emergency response and enforcing accountability, from feeding people in the forest to challenging the legal basis of the regime that put them there. There are also tentative signs that the broader climate of anti-migrant hostility in public attitudes has shifted over time. Public attitudes towards migration in Lithuania, while never comfortable, appear to have softened somewhat from the extreme hostility of the 2021 peak, though precise figures are difficult to establish and the legal architecture of exclusion remains firmly in place. Whether Sienos Grupė’s sustained counter-narrative work contributed to this apparent shift is impossible to measure with certainty, but it is difficult to imagine it played no role.
None of this impact came without cost. There were criminal investigations, harassment, burnout, and serious social costs for those involved. But the conditions that made Sienos Grupė vulnerable also, paradoxically, made the organisational form resilient. Precisely because the group operated outside institutional frameworks, with no formal registration, no significant funding, no leadership structure to target, it was less susceptible to the forms of pressure the state routinely deploys against organised civil society. There was no director to arrest, no funding stream to cut, no NGO registration to revoke. Its weak integration into mainstream institutions, usually understood as a liability, meant it had less to lose. This organisational form also granted a tactical mobility that resource-rich organisations lacked. Unconstrained by the need to maintain cooperative relations with the state, or by bureaucratic procedures and institutional risk aversion, Sienos Grupė could react quickly, speak freely, and go where others would not. The group also leveraged what resources it did have with considerable skill, developing journalistic connections, legal expertise, and relationships with influential individuals that gave it access to the political sphere disproportionate to its size. In contexts of high political hostility, this kind of informal flexibility allowed for a disproportionate political impact in the public sphere.
A network of roughly forty-five volunteers, coordinating via Telegram with no budget and no institutional backing, operated in a society where at times a reported 93% of the public supported the illegal practices they were documenting. They faced criminal investigation, political vilification, and a media environment overwhelmingly hostile to their work. And yet they produced the most reliable independent data on pushbacks in the country, forced a government ministry to repeatedly revise its official narrative, supported legal challenges that have yielded several victories, and became the de facto partner of choice for MSF when that organisation could no longer operate within state-sanctioned channels. Constraints that looked like weaknesses turned out to be a form of structural resilience. The very features that made Sienos Grupė appear precarious, no hierarchy, no registration, no funding, made it harder to neutralise. This is obviously not an argument for under-resourcing solidarity movements, but rather for understanding what kinds of organisational forms can survive and prove effective when the institutional environment turns hostile.
Networks and the Transnational Dimension
Sienos Grupė did not emerge in isolation. It was directly inspired by Grupa Granica, a Polish grassroots network that had formed in 2021 in response to the parallel crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, and whose model of decentralised, volunteer-led humanitarian action and documentation provided the template. Regular coordination between the two organisations, sharing tactics, data, and legal strategy, fostered a transnational network oriented around aligned forms of state violence and the same forms of repression. This extended further, to activist and human rights groups in Latvia, Belarus, and Germany, and to several Lithuanian research organisations whose documentation fed into advocacy and public discourse.
Grupa Granica’s record in Poland offers a parallel measure of what such an organisational model can achieve. Operating under comparable conditions, state of emergency, access restrictions, criminalisation of volunteers, and overwhelming public hostility, the group made contact with over 5,000 migrants and refugees at the border, documented at least 37 deaths attributable to pushbacks and state violence, and won 10 landmark court rulings confirming that Polish pushback practices violated the Constitution, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights. The first financial compensation for an illegal pushback was awarded in November 2025. Like Sienos Grupė, the group has faced sustained attempts at criminalisation across successive governments, with prosecutors alleging that humanitarian aid constitutes smuggling. Like Sienos Grupė, it has refused to stop.
When domestic legal and media channels are captured or hostile, transnational connections provide alternatives: international visibility, comparative evidence, solidarity from outside the national frame that is harder for the state to dismiss as internal subversion. In a political environment where advocates are accused of anti-State activity, affiliation with internationally recognised movements makes that framing harder to sustain, reframing the local struggle as part of a larger, principled resistance.
Conclusion
The situation in Lithuania is not exceptional. It is one fairly small-scale version of a dynamic increasingly visible across the EU. The criminalisation of sea rescue. The prosecution of volunteers. The sustained effort by governments and EU institutions alike to conflate humanitarian action with criminality. Each iteration normalises the next, and the space for dissent and civil society narrows.
Against this, the Sienos Grupė case offers neither blueprint nor consolation. The Lithuanian border remains a site of violence, and the legal architecture that enables it remains intact. But the case does suggest that the conditions which make grassroots resistance appear weakest, scarce resources, no institutional footing, a hostile public, are not always what determine its effectiveness. What was demonstrated here was a clarity of purpose, a willingness to document everything, a refusal to trade access for silence, and a capacity to build connections that extended the struggle beyond what any single state could contain.
When an overwhelming majority of your compatriots support the practices you are trying to stop, going into the forest anyway isn’t futile, naive, or idealist, it can make a real difference. The space for civil society may be shrinking, but it hasn’t closed, and understanding why, and how groups like Sienos Grupė have kept it open, matters for everyone struggling against the reactionary tide.
[1] Interview conducted as part of fieldwork for Nangle & Blažytė, The Construction of Hostility Towards Migrants: The Case of the Lithuanian-Belarusian Border Crisis of 2021 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026)
[2] For the border as a contested site of struggle rather than fixed state infrastructure, see for example Tazzioli, M. (2018). Containment through mobility: Migrants’ spatial disobediences and the reshaping of control through the hotspot system. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(16), 2764–2779. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1401514
***
Benjamin Nangle is a PhD researcher at KU Leuven, focused on the far right and migration issues, with a particular interest in digital communication, propaganda, and social media discourses. He is currently involved in investigating far right persuasion strategies, and developing counter measures and interventions to reduce youth susceptibility, as part of the DEMINE project (https://demine.eu/). He recently published a book on the construction of hostility to migrants during the Lithuanian/Belarusian border crisis with Palgrave Macmillan. Outside of research, he has have significant experience as a humanitarian worker in the refugee and asylum sector. He also has political organising experience.
Image credit:
©Berta Tilmante / NARA.lt