LATVIA: Latvia unable to buckle down the day-long truck queues on the Russian-Latvian border

As the winter weather begins to bite, truck drivers travelling from the European Union to Russia, are lined up at the Latvian border. For several months, the lines of trucks have been growing, with drivers forced to wait for days in queues stretching up to 50 kilometres at times. The tripling of freight traffic since August is a result of the Belarussian government adopting stricter border restrictions. Drivers have modified their routes and chosen to travel through Latvia, rather than via Belarus. The situation on the Latvian-Russian borders is considered a nightmare by state officials, truck drivers and local residents. Currently only two border checkpoints accept freight transport and between 700 to 1,000 trucks line up daily. Drivers are resigned to days of queuing. "To my mind, approximately two days, at least," one truck driver from Lithuania said. Latvian roads are narrow and traffic safety is an issue as only one lane is open to regular traffic. The biggest challenge for the truck drivers are sanitary and hygienic ones. There are few toilets and nowhere to dispose of waste along the roads. "There is no water, and as you can see it's impossible to drive out of the queue. The Latvian government promised to install WCs and waste containers. What should we do with the waste if there are no containers? There are WCs are every 3 km, but we cannot run that far all the time," Lithuanian truck driver, Vitas Kontrimas said. The recent snow does not camouflage the piles of litter that have grown in the ditches over the last couple of months and local residents have been engaged by the government to clean up. "They pay. They promised to pay well. That's why we work here, we need some money. We are out of work. I'm retired, but there's four people in my family, and one needs to earn the daily bread, you know," said local resident Natalija Prone. In November the police detained seven border guards, who allowed truck drivers to bypass the queues at the Grebneva border crossing. "At the moment it is not a problem. If the freight is urgent it is accompanied by police, but there is no bypassing as there was before. Now we all have to queue," Lithuanian truck driver, Algis Kaunas said. Almost half of the trucks in the queues are registered in Lithuania, between 15-17% are from Poland and other EU member states. Between 17-18% of the trucks are registered in Russia and only 15% are from Latvia. "We see that these are transit freights heading for Russia through Latvia. It was not possible to forecast this sudden traffic increase," said Maris Pekalis, director of the road transport department of the Ministry of Transport. A group of Latvian and Russian experts assigned to analyse the situation found that the problem was exacerbated by the seven different border controls that have been imposed by Russia. EU regulations require only two; border checks and customs clearance. On the Latvian side of the border the trucks pass through relatively quickly, but the thorough checks in Russia creates the massive queues. Russian representatives admit there is a need to improve the management of their border controls and the Russian government has assigned funding to reconstruct the existing border check points. The Latvian government has also decided to improve the border crossing conditions and has allocated money for a new road to be built by the Terehova border check point. However this work is not likely to be completed until 2008. As a long term solution the Latvian and Russian experts are considering the possibility of opening a new border checkpoint. But the experts are keeping in mind that Belarus could change its border restrictions at any time, making all such changes unnecessary. "The Belarussians are working actively to turn the traffic in their direction. And if this happens the queues will disappear right away," Pekalis said.

ITN Source | January 4, 2007

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