ATHENS —More than 200,000 migrants have reached Greece’s eastern Aegean islands this year, with half of them arriving in the last two months alone, Alternate Shipping Minister Thodoris Dritsas told Greek television on Wednesday.

Cash-strapped Greece has been overwhelmed by an influx of refugees, most of whom have fled wartorn Syria and are seeking EU protection. Many arrive on the Greek islands in overcrowded boats from Turkey, hoping to reach wealthier countries such as Germany. Others have flooded into Italy.

Dritsas did not say how many migrants had already crossed the Greek border to Macedonia this year.

“It is not possible to deal with this influx,” said Tasia Christodoulopoulou, the minister responsible for migration. The biggest problem is registering the migrants, she said —a process that takes 20-30 minutes per person, with hundreds arriving daily.

On Wednesday, the ferry Eleftherios Venizelos transported around 2,500 refugees from the island of Lesbos to Piraeus, near Athens, according to the coast guard.

A further 800 arrived at the northern port of Kavala in the northeast of the country, with plans to transport the refugees to the Macedonian border over the course of the day.

Tens of thousands of migrants are estimated to have left Greece and crossed the Balkan states, passing through Macedonia and Serbia, in order to re-enter the European Union in Hungary.

Hungarian authorities registered a record of 2,533 illegal entries from Serbia on Tuesday alone, 460 more than the day before, according to statistics released Wednesday.

Many were able to scale a 175-kilometre-long razor wire fence at the border, built by the conservative Hungarian government to prevent migrants from entering.

Seeking to strengthen the border further, Hungary plans to introduce special border police.

Chief police commissioner Karoly Papp told reporters in Budapest that the 2,100 “border rangers,” trained police officers, are to begin patrolling in mid-September.

The refugees had been able to travel toward Hungary at the weekend after the authorities in Macedonia caved in to pressure and opened the border to thousands stranded in no-man’s land.

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Since then, more than 10,000 people have arrived in Serbia, where the rate of arriving refugees has rocketed to several times the average of previous months.

Europe’s migration crisis is set to top the agenda at a summit in Vienna on Thursday between the European Union and six Western Balkan countries — Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia.

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