Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has demanded Germany to accept 2,000 migrants stranded at the Poland-Belarus border,

Urging migrants to "go westwards" on Friday and promised he wouldn't "beat or choke" people who tried to cross the border into the EU.

He added his country would help them to return home if they wanted to go back but Belarus would not force them.

"We won’t repatriate them, we will ask them, those who can, to leave," Lukashenko said during his first visit to the migrant warehouse centre in Bruzgi, near the border with Poland.

Thousands of migrants are stuck on the European Union's eastern frontier, in what the EU says is a crisis Minsk engineered by distributing Belarusian visas in the Middle East, flying them in and pushing them across the border.

But Lukashenko said it was the EU that deliberately provoked a humanitarian crisis that needed to be resolved. He said he would work on solving the issue by New Year’s Eve.

The EU has agreed on new sanctions in response to the border crisis, which diplomats in Brussels say should be approved and adopted in early December.

Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, bearing the brunt of the crisis, have deployed thousands of border guards, soldiers and police to seal the border and push back migrants attempting to cross over from Belarus.

Belarus has flown some migrants home but has said it is waiting for an answer from the EU on its demand that Germany should accept 2,000 stranded at the border, which the EU has rejected and Germany has denied agreeing to it.

On Friday, two planes brought hundreds of Iraqis back from Belarus to Erbil, capital of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region.

Two more flights were expected on Nov. 26-27, the TASS news agency reported.

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