Despite a decrease in the number of vehicles waiting from around 300 during the night to the current queue of 230 at Terehova, other border crossing stations were not at all busy. For instance, at Grebņeva there were no lines of trucks reported at all.
However at Silene and Pāternieki, both going into Belarus there were about 60 vehicles expected to have to wait about eleven hours on the Latvian side.
According to the Customs Service the Russian side has seen the implementing of tightened controls on entering cargo vehicles in recent weeks, thus causing the back-ups on the Latvian side. The State Revenue Service told LETA control measures for leaving Latvia are being conducted according to the usual procedures and therefore have nothing to do with the current delays.
Many of the trucks are in transit from Lithuania, whose President Dalia Grybauskaite angered Russia by referring to it as a “terrorist state” in November, after which the truck lines in Latvia began to form on November 25.
Several years ago, economic tensions between Russia and its Baltic neighbors caused severe queueing of trucks the length of which soon became like a measuring stick for how bad relations between them were.
