Our neighboring country’s National Association of Road Carriers “Linava” has urged officials to increase the efficiency of customs operations, but it will be of little use if Belarusians do not start working on their side of the border.
The newspaper “Respublika” recalls that the crisis began already on February 10, when Poland closed the Bobrovnik border checkpoint, in this way reacting to the decision of a court obedient to the leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, to sentence the Polish journalist Andrzej Pohobut, who was a journalist of the Polish newspaper “Gazeta Wyborcza”, to eight years in prison. correspondent. Minsk and Warsaw exchanged notes, each expelled three representatives of the neighboring country who had diplomatic status until then, and a week ago Poland also announced the closure of the Koroszczyn border checkpoint to trucks from third countries.
Truck drivers who are on their way from Europe to Belarus currently have no choice but to enter Lithuania via the so-called Suwalki corridor and then go to Belarus. As a result, there have been huge traffic jams at the border. “Linava” manager Zenon Buivids stated that drivers have not been created suitable conditions to wait in such long queues. “They have nowhere to rest, nowhere to take a shower, nowhere, excuse me, to take care of their natural needs,” he was quoted as saying by “Respublika”. Buivids emphasized that on behalf of “Linava”.
will appeal to the Ministry of Finance and Transport, as well as the Customs Service, urging them to resolve this crisis as soon as possible, due to which road transport is stuck and the country is not receiving, among other things, the taxes it could have received. At the beginning of the week, the Customs Service informed the ELTA news agency that the mobile units of customs officers have already been sent to the border control points in order to increase their throughput capacity. However, there is no big difference in how quickly the customs officers and border guards work on one side of the border, if the relevant services of Belarus work very slowly on the other side, and cars that have long been checked in Lithuania cannot enter Belarus for hours. “Delfi.lt” adds that even those trucks that are on their way to Lithuania from Belarus have to wait in very long lines.
It follows from the statement of the Lithuanian Customs Service that Poland’s decision to close the border control points for officials in Vilnius did not come unexpectedly and the relevant information was received some time in advance. However, preventing traffic jams on the border with Belarus is said to be a very difficult task, because there are as many border crossing points as there are, and no one is going to build new ones. To the extent possible, carriers are provided with information on which control point has the smallest queues, but long-distance travelers themselves also actively share this information.
“Respublika” emphasizes that it is difficult to hope for the normalization of the situation, because there are not the slightest signs that would allow us to hope for the improvement of relations between Poland and Belarus. On the contrary, last week the Polish Minister of Defense Mariusz Blaščak informed that anti-tank barriers, so-called hedgehogs, will be installed on the border with Belarus. The installation of such has already started in the approximately 200-kilometer long section where Poland borders the Kaliningrad region of Russia, and taking into account Belarus’ support for the Kremlin’s aggressive invasion of Ukraine, the fact that Belarus played the role of a bridgehead at the beginning of the invasion, Poland also wants to distance itself more and more decisively from its other eastern neighbor.
