Belarus has introduced a fee for waiting at the border

Now travel through checkpoints is carried out for money and on a first-come, first-served basis

Entering the territory of Belarus through its western border is no longer a free pleasure. President Alexander Lukashenko signed a decree according to which the arrival of cars in the waiting area at the border must be paid. The funds received from the “border” collection will be used for the material and technical improvement of the Belarusian border guards. Will this affect the flow of Baltic residents visiting Belarus?

The popularity of the Belarusian destination for residents of Lithuania and Latvia has increased dramatically at the beginning of this year. Despite the prices in Belarusian stores quite comparable to those in Moscow, a number of goods turned out to be more attractive for the Baltic neighbors than in their homeland.

Entire queues of cars with European numbers lined up on the border with Belarus for cheap gasoline, cereals, flour and salt. If the freight transport at the entrance and exit after the introduction of mutual restrictions on the passage of trucks has become much smaller, then the size of the queue of cars on both sides of the border has only increased.

For example, on August 16, on the border with Lithuania, at the checkpoints Benyakoni, Losha and Privalka, more than 100 cars queued to leave Belarus, and more than 120 of them accumulated in Kamenny Log.

On the border with Latvia, the situation was calmer, and there were almost no queues. But on the Polish border there were twice as many cars as on the Lithuanian one. More than 500 cars were waiting to enter Poland in Berestovitsa, as well as in Brest.

Free travel to Belarus was facilitated by the visa-free regime that Lukashenka introduced for residents of the Baltic states in April, and for Poles in July. A total of 186,625 people have arrived in Belarus since the introduction of the visa-free regime, of which 120,515 are from Lithuania, 62,218 from Latvia and 3,892 from Poland.

Previously, in order to simplify your passage through the checkpoint, you could stand in an electronic queue for a fee. The owner of the paid coupon could cross the border without hindrance at the appointed time. Now the electronic queue is cancelled. And everyone who will make tours to Belarus on their own transport is required to pay for their stay in a live queue at the checkpoint. The cost of this service is not specified in the decree. Normative documents will appear later.

In addition to unifying and streamlining the work of waiting area operators, the possibility of attracting additional funds to finance the strengthening of borders is noted as a positive aspect of the new decree. To what extent is such an innovation justified? Will Belarus lose its Baltic buyers?

Belarusian political scientist Aleksey Dzermant told MK that there would be no reduction in the flow of people arriving in Belarus. “Those citizens who come here have their own specific goals that they strive for, and they will be ready to take new measures of the Belarusian state. They won’t have a choice. Of course, someone may refuse to travel because of this, but this will definitely not affect the total number of people arriving in the country from neighboring states.”

At the same time, the logic of introducing fees for waiting in line at checkpoints, according to Dzermant, is not unreasonable. “Belarusian authorities proceed from the task of getting the necessary funds to the budget at the expense of incoming neighbors. The situation with the provision of border protection and the state of the borders requires budget expenditures. In this case, this path is the most rational.