Ill-considered small border traffic program with Poland will be catastrophe – Belarus official
It will be a catastrophe to launch an ‘unprepared’ program, Leanid Maltsau, the chairman of the State Border Committee of Belarus, says referring to Poland’s data on the small border traffic with Ukraine.
“The flow of people there increases by 20-30% a year and has already made up half of the total traffic. It is twice as big as our current flow across the border with Poland. It shows that the load on our border checkpoints will considerably increase once we launch our small border traffic program. If we do it unprepared, it will be a catastrophe. We would paralyze the whole border,” state-run news agency BelTA quotes the chairman as saying.
Belarus does support the idea of launching small border traffic, Maltsau stresses recalling that the country signed appropriate agreements with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
The ‘most available option’ – small border traffic with Latvia – has been already tested, the official says. At the same time, he fears that a similar program of cooperation with Poland would do no good if it turns out to be premature and ill-thought-out.
