Merkel appeals to Putin to intervene in Belarus border crisis

Call comes after Polish PM said Russia was behind flow of people from Middle East to EU borders

Angela Merkel has asked Vladimir Putin to intervene in the crisis on the Belarus-Poland border in an appeal to Minsk's key foreign sponsor as the EU prepared a new set of sanctions against Belarus.

In a phone call on a crisis that has escalated dramatically since Monday, when 1,000 people mainly from Iraqi Kurdistan arrived on the border, the German chancellor told Putin that the use of migrants by the Belarusian regime was inhuman and unacceptable and asked [Putin] to influence the regime in Minsk", according to the chancellor's spokesperson, Steffen Seibert, who described the situation as state-sanctioned human trafficking".