Irregular crossings on the Western Balkans migration route fall sharply in 2025-26 amid pushback allegations and Drina River deaths

Summary

The Western Balkans migration route, which had seen peak crossings of several hundred thousand per year in 2015-16 and a secondary peak in 2022-23, recorded a sharp decline in official detection figures in 2024 and into 2025-26. Frontex reported a 71 percent fall in detected crossings in the first five months of 2024 compared with the same period in 2023, and Bosnia and Herzegovina registered approximately 25,200 irregular arrivals in 2024, down 27 percent from 2023. The route runs from Turkey and Greece through North Macedonia and Serbia, crossing into Croatia and Slovenia before continuing to Western Europe, with the Bosnia-Croatia border and the Croatia-Slovenia corridor remaining key bottlenecks. Human rights organizations monitoring the Balkan Route documented a parallel set of trends: at least 12 people drowned crossing the Drina River on the Serbia-Bosnia border; Croatian border police were reported to have conducted pushbacks with violence and burned migrants' belongings; Serbian reception centres were closed reducing available shelter; and Frontex officers were reported to have been intimidated into silence regarding witnessing abuse in Bulgaria. NGOs questioned whether the fall in detection figures reflected reduced flows or effective non-detection, noting that smuggling routes had shifted to harder-to-patrol forested terrain.

The split

EU Council and Frontex framed the detection decline as a success of enhanced border management, cooperation agreements with Western Balkans states, and investment in monitoring infrastructure. EU interior ministers from Hungary, Serbia and Slovakia, who favor tighter border controls, cited the figures as validating restrictive policies. ECRE, Human Rights Watch and mixed migration researchers argued that the detection numbers do not distinguish between deterrence and evasion, and that the humanitarian costs (deaths, violence) of the current enforcement regime are not captured in the headline statistics. Croatian government officials denied systematic pushback allegations; Croatian human rights NGOs and the EU Fundamental Rights Agency documented specific incidents. Bosnian civil society noted that Serbia's closure of reception centers had transferred pressure to Bosnia's existing camps, which remained overstretched.

By the numbers

• 71%, fall in Western Balkans route detections in Jan-May 2024 vs Jan-May 2023 (Frontex)
• 25,200, approximate irregular arrivals registered in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2024 (down 27%)
• 11,298, illegal border crossings detected in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2024 (down 17%)
• 12+, deaths in the Drina River on the Serbia-Bosnia border (as documented by ECRE through 2025-26)
• 5, confirmed BTV-3 cases in Northern Ireland (unrelated figure, disregard)
• Main route: Turkey/Greece → North Macedonia → Serbia → Bosnia/Croatia → Slovenia → Western EU

Why it matters

The Balkan Route is one of the principal land corridors through which asylum seekers and economic migrants reach the European Union from the Middle East, Central and South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The route's status is a direct indicator of EU-Turkey relations, EU enlargement dynamics in the Western Balkans, and the political sustainability of EU common asylum policy. The human rights concerns documented by ECRE and others carry legal weight under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Refugee Convention, and ongoing investigations by the European Parliament and the EU Fundamental Rights Agency into Frontex behavior and border violence maintain the issue in EU institutional debate. The fall in detections, whatever its cause, has not translated into a cessation of the humanitarian problems associated with irregular transit.

What to watch

• Whether Frontex deploys additional officers in Bosnia and Herzegovina under the 2025-26 cooperation agreement
• EU Parliament hearings on Frontex officer conduct and migrant abuse documentation
• Whether the Drina River death toll prompts diplomatic engagement between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Whether the Croatia-Slovenia border controls introduced during the 2022 peak are maintained or wound back