Echoing remarks made by Italian President Sergio Mattarella, the Vatican newspaper lamented the plight of migrants in the Belarus–European Union border crisis.

“What is happening on the border between Poland and Belarus is only the latest story that unfortunately highlights the contradictions of a policy unable to effectively combine the security needs of states and the protections and rights that refugees and migrants should enjoy,” writes L’Osservatore Romano’s Gaetano Vallini. “Unfortunately, a political use of migrants emerges; deceived with the false promise of being able to arrive in the EU, they have become a weapon of blackmail, an unarmed army and unaware of a war of which they are doubly victims.”

With several hundred lives at stake, Vallini called on the EU to make its “statements of principle and public statements of solidarity [with refugees] coincide with concrete facts.”