Thousands of asylum seekers have sought to cross the border to Europe from Russia to Norway and Finland during 2015–2016 and through Belarus since 2021. This migration at the EU’s external borders encapsulates the geopolitical and weaponizing potential of global migration for authoritarian illiberal states. In this chapter, we argue that both the migration from Russia during the 2015–2016 ‘migration crisis’ and the asylum seekers stranded at the Belarus–Polish border since 2021 reveal interesting perspectives on the EU’s and its member states’ responses to both migration and its instrumentalization, as well as on liberalism and illiberalism in global migration. Both the illiberal Russian and Belarusian states and the responses of Finland and Poland as EU member states feature key characteristics of illiberalism and demonstrate the contradictory character and the effectiveness of these attempts at coercive engineered migration.
