Austrian Foreign Minister Calls EU Refugees Resettlement Plan 'Unrealistic'

Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz on Sunday called the European Union's refugee resettlement plan "unrealistic."

MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Last summer, the European Union signed an agreement on refugees resettlement, which seek to diminish the pressure on external border states. The bloc's member states will share around 160,000 refugees.

"The goal is absolutely unrealistic," Kurz told Welt am Sonntag newspaper in an interview adding that "many refugees refuse to go to particular EU countries."

In 2015, Austria saw a threefold increase in the number of refugees coming to the country, with some 90,000 applications lodged for asylum. Vienna has put a cap of a maximum 37,500 asylum applications for 2016, with Defense Minister Hans Peter Doskozil warning that this limit would be reached by November. Austria had accepted as many as 26,000 applications by September.

Europe is struggling to find a solution to a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa. EU border agency Frontex detected over 1.83 million illegal border crossings in 2015, in contrast to some 283,000 in 2014.