‘They Forced People Throw Away Everything Polish, Even Chocolates’

A truck driver from Brest is speaking about the situation with queues at checkpoints.

In the afternoon on October 12, according to the State Border Committee of Belarus, queues of heavy trucks formed on the border with the European Union. In total, about 1,000 trucks were at noon to enter the EU states bordering on our country, writes Brestskaya Gazeta.

At the same time, at the checkpoint Kazlovichy near Brest, there were no cars at all as of midday. There were about 10 of them around 8 am on Monday, at midnight - about 20. Last night, from Saturday to Sunday, the State Border Committee reported a little more than 50 trucks simultaneously awaiting registration to leave Belarus.

According to media reports, the queues to leave Belarus have been observed for more than three weeks. They either decrease or increase, but do not disappear completely. Let us remind you that during his speech at the “women's forum” in Minsk, Lukashenka said that the country “is forced to close the state border from the west”. The next day, the State Border Committee reported that the state border was being guarded in an enhanced version.

Aliaksandr from Brest, who has been working in the field of cargo transportation since 2015, spoke about what has changed in terms of border crossing after that Lukashenka's statement. He now works for a Polish company whose trucks travel across Europe through Belarus to Russia. The man himself mainly travels from Poland to Russia and back. Over the past few weeks, he crossed the Belarusian-Polish border through the checkpoints Kazlovichy and Babrouniki.

“Now we pass the border for two or three days, because Belarusians start with a couple of cars and until they are registered, the rest are standing. The treadways are very large - from the Podzero and Biala Podlaska parking lots to the border. You cross the border in two shifts. If we take into account the break, then this is a very long time. It turns out that you have a nine-hour shift, a minimum break of nine hours, and another nine hours for the second shift,” says the trucker. “According to my observations, the Belarusian border began to work more slowly, documents are being checked much more thoroughly. Cars go, of course, but not the way they used to. Previously, we crossed the border in 6-8 hours, but now everything is very sad. Especially when you go towards Belarus ”.

Registration after entering the terminal at both the Polish and Belarusian checkpoints takes about an hour, Aliaksnadr adds. But to wait for this moment, as mentioned earlier, it takes 2 - 3 days, precisely because the Belarusian side deals with several cars, although the terminal has more than 30 windows for registration.

Aliaksandr and his colleagues believe that this is due to politics - because of the sanctions, Belarus has tightened control on the border with European countries.

Truckers have no problems with goods for personal use, according to Aliaksandr.

“You can take home whatever you want - coffee, diapers. No questions asked. I even asked if it was possible to carry the outboard motor, they told me: “Why not?”, explains the interlocutor. “This ban was imposed, apparently, only on passenger channels. We drove through the Babrouniki BCP, where people who were driving in cars were forced to unload everything that was Polish from the car and leave it at the checkpoint or throw it into the trash. Even chocolates.”