Alazar Tesfay warms his hands over a fire in a makeshift refugee camp in Germany, surrounded by a dozen migrants from his hometown in Ethiopia. Only months ago they were 800 miles away on a treacherous, snow-covered smuggling route between Poland and Belarus.
“By July, I will come to the UK. I love the UK. England is my everything,” he says, googling pictures of English football teams. “Soon [the smugglers] will help me cross.”
The men, who are all in their twenties, say they were told by international smugglers that the “easiest way” to get to the UK was to fly into Russia, drive through Belarus and bribe border guards to cut through a wire fence separating it from the EU, before trekking through Poland’s
