Katelynas says migrants fill study programmes but skip lectures
Sunday 11th October 2026 on 20:45 in
Lithuania
Interior Minister Martynas Katelynas says migrants are filling study programmes but not attending lectures, LRT reported. He also said Lithuania would review its migration policy and strengthen controls on incoming migrants and Russian citizens travelling through the country.
About 100 soldiers have been deployed this week to help border guards protect the frontier with Russia’s Kaliningrad region. Officials say the situation there is calm. Katelynas described the deployment as a preventive measure, citing the possibility that Russian citizens facing mobilisation could try to enter Lithuania and seek asylum.
Katelynas said authorities were assessing information that Russia could carry out a large mobilisation after presidential elections he referred to as taking place at the end of the month. He said some mobilised people might be in Kaliningrad or brought there for training, and could attempt to enter Lithuania illegally.
He also cited hybrid threats and instrumentalised migration, pointing to an incident in Latvia in which masked people appeared. Katelynas said it was unclear whether they were migrant smugglers or Belarusian special services. He said Lithuania had also turned back more than 40 migrants at its border this week.
Asked whether there had been unusual activity at the border, Katelynas said there had not. He said several scenarios were possible, including individual or small-group attempts to enter Lithuania and seek asylum, and that the preventive measures were intended to protect the country.
Katelynas said instrumentalised migration had eased somewhat since the 2021 migration crisis, when thousands of people tried to enter Lithuania. He said Latvia had faced a sharp increase in such activity this year, with consequences for secondary migration, but that the numbers had since fallen tenfold. He added that attempts to cross into the European Union often rise before the cold season, although Lithuania had dealt with previous attempts by migrants to enter.