The Minister of Internal Affairs of Estonia, Lauri Läenemets, said that on the Russian side of the southeastern border with his country, the Russian authorities took the Ukrainian refugees who were there and took them somewhere on trucks. This was reported by the national broadcaster ERR.
"Earlier, a little over a thousand people were waiting at the border, but today they are no longer there - they were put on trucks and taken away. We don't know where they were taken. The Department of Police and Border Guard is currently working on obtaining this information," he said.
According to the minister, Estonia uses drones to find out whether the Russian authorities are sending these people somewhere in the green border strip, as Belarus did last year on the border with Lithuania and Latvia.
In recent days, more than a thousand people, mostly Ukrainians, gathered on the Russian side near the southeastern border of Estonia, whose entry to Estonia was prevented by the Russian authorities, delaying the border procedures. As a result, a queue was created near the southeastern border of Estonia, in which people waited for several days to cross the border.
The minister noted that if Russia decides to push people en masse to illegally cross the border, Estonia cannot by default consider all of them Ukrainians fleeing the war, as the crowd may also include Russian citizens and exiled Russian agents.
"Of course, everyone else will be included in this crowd, including citizens of the Russian Federation, and all kinds of agents and other people," the official said.
According to the minister, Estonia has also established contact with the Ukrainian embassy to check the biographies of people arriving and find out if they are who they say they are.
Recently, the number of Ukrainian refugees at the border of Estonia has increased. More than a hundred Ukrainian citizens entering Estonia from Russia arrive at the Narva border crossing every day.