Following today’s meeting with Prime Minister Aleksandr Turchin, the delegation of Polish and Lithuanian truck carriers noted the high level of dialogue with the Belarusian side. This is not surprising, since the policy of good neighbourliness has always been pursued in the republic at the level of the President and the Government, regardless of the political background. The situation when foreign carriers were essentially left to the mercy of fate by their governments has not become an exception.
Due to the politically biased decisions of their own authorities, including restrictions on transit and the closure of checkpoints, about a thousand trucks with Lithuanian registration got blocked and deprived of the opportunity to fully operate on their usual routes. International road carriers have addressed the President of Belarus with a request to help resolve the situation with the Lithuanian-registered trucks. The Head of State considered their request and, guided by humanitarian grounds, instructed the Prime Minister to meet with the carriers and listen to their position. Everyone got a chance to speak, and they all were carefully listened to.
According to the representatives of the delegation, they came to Belarus with the hope that they would be able to solve all their problems and continue co-operation in a neighbourly way, jointly carrying out international transportation. Being people of logistics, they think logically, and they were pleased to see the same attitude to all their issues in Belarus. These people witnessed understanding in the republic because ordinary transport workers had found themselves in a difficult international situation, not the politicians who caused it. Representatives of the Polish delegation, for example, noted that about 30 percent of Polish carriers had suffered losses because of the political decisions on that side.
Aneta Boruta, a representative of the Polish company, a member of the Board of the Committee for the Protection of the Interests of Hauliers and Employers of Motor Transport, informed on what exactly the foreign delegation had asked the Belarusian side for, “We primarily asked the Belarusian side to allow Polish vehicles to leave the country by the same way they entered Belarus, mainly through the Kozlovichi-Koroszczyn checkpoint. We also asked either to cancel the parking fee completely, or to calculate it in a minimum amount, because the average amount of payment for one vehicle is now about 16,000 Euros.”
In turn, Krzysztof Songin, the head of the Lithuanian delegation, a representative of a Lithuanian company, noted that the trucks have been in Belarus for four months now and Lithuanian companies are suffering heavy losses as a result, “We contacted all possible bodies, but received no response. Therefore, we decided to write a letter asking the President of Belarus to consider this situation. We hoped that we would be heard in the country. There are about 1,000 haulers and 1,700+ semi-trailers with Lithuanian registration in the parking lot in Belarus. We wrote a letter and have come as an initiative group of international carriers of Lithuania. Colleagues from Poland wrote a letter of their own as well.”
It is worth noting that some Polish and Lithuanian companies have up to 90 percent of their fleet stranded in Belarus. No one has received compensation from the governments of their countries or insurance companies and does not even hope for it. Insurance companies are not required to pay carriers anything because this situation is not considered as an insured event: the vehicles were not stolen or involved in a road traffic accident.
photos: www.belta.by