Passenger cars passed through Russian customs without additional tightened checks, he told BNS. The throughput of trucks had increased by up to 25 percent, the official added.
“Situation has improved. Checks of passenger vehicles are back to normal, there are significant improvements. The flow of cargo vehicles has increased as well. By up to 25 percent at the checkpoint of Panemunė and by up to 10 percent at Kybartai,” Sipavičius told BNS.
He warned, however, that it was too early to make any conclusions.
“We can state preliminarily that the situation is getting back to normal. However, information about internal customs offices will only be available in the morning when the daily statistical data will be provided. Then we could make conclusions. Now we only have information about twelve hours and it’s too early to make any conclusions. Sometimes situation in the evening is totally different from what there is in the morning,” Lithuania’s Customs chief said.
Evelina Butkutė-Lazdauskienė, spokeswoman for Lithuania’s Prime Minister, told BNS that the authorities were currently collecting information about the situation at Latvia’s and Estonia’s borders with Russia.
The Russian Federal Customs Service stated on Wednesday that Putin had ordered the service to lift the enhanced customs control at the Russian-Lithuanian border and to switch to a normal regime on Thursday, October 10.
Russia imposed tightened customs checks on goods from Lithuania and on Lithuanian truckers in September. Earlier this week, it stopped imports of Lithuanian dairy products.
