The road from the Latvian village of Terekhovo leads to the busiest border crossing on the country's eastern border. It is at this place that heavy trucks are checked - whether they comply with EU sanctions before they cross the border with Russia. There are many problems, the traffic jam is huge - you have to wait three or four days. “Last time I stayed here for five days, and then two more on the Russian side&rdquo, one of the drivers told DW.
Because of the invasion of Ukraine, the EU has imposed strict sanctions on Russia, customs officers must check every truck. The sanctions target several thousand types of goods: from champagne and perfumery to everything that can be used by the military. “The situation has changed a lot - not only at this border crossing - throughout the EU, throughout the world.
Today, more than 60 percent of customs officers' work is devoted to checks to detect illegal cargo,” says customs officer Guntar Kokins. The workload has increased, but the resources are not enough. Officers explain to DW that sometimes goods are documented as being headed for Kazakhstan to make everything look legal, but they disappear halfway - in Russia.
European project helps uncover violations
At the headquarters of the Latvian customs administration in Riga, border crossings are monitored on video screens. This allows employees to support their colleagues on the ground and monitor their work - including as a measure against corruption. As Raimonds Zukuls, the director of the Latvian National Customs Administration, told DW, now we need to work faster and more carefully. At the same time, however, everything must be examined very carefully and not rushed, in order to check whether there are any illegal goods among the transported goods.
This year, Latvian customs officers have detained over 2,000 trucks traveling to Russia and Belarus, and over a hundred criminal cases have been initiated. Among the prohibited goods were engines, steel products and optical devices. Many of them were detected using X-ray machines - within the framework of a unique project according to EU standards, which began several years ago. In the meantime, the X-ray images are analyzed centrally, in Riga - although they were taken 300 km from the Latvian capital. Expert analysts work at the customs administration, and their work is yielding results. And since the end of the war is not in sight, the sanctions will probably remain - as well as the traffic jams at the border.
The most common scheme for circumventing sanctions
The deputy head of the Latvian Financial Intelligence Service, Paulis Ilenkovs, told the website rus.lsm.lv the following: “These are export and import operations, hiding the fact that the exporting country is Russia. They declare a country from Central Asia and thus circumvent the sanctions. The transactions are carried out in the same way in the other direction - a Central Asian country is indicated as the importer, although the goods are from Russia. The last such case was with a luxury car that was supposedly supposed to reach Central Asia, but was actually sold in Russia”.
According to Paulis Ilenkovs, the risk of evading sanctions in Latvia is much higher than in many other EU countries: "Our geographical position is unique - we are practically the only EU country that has borders with Russia and Belarus. Lithuania also has such borders, but it only has a border with Kaliningrad. There are also a large number of Russians affected by sanctions who have business interests in Latvia, and this naturally increases the risk of evading sanctions," he points out.