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Russian trucks form record queues in Finland

Russian trucks have queued up for 100 kilometres (62 miles) at the Finnish border ahead of the holiday season, prompting the Nordic nation to ask the European Union for help eliminating the record blockage.

Russia’s booming economy has led to constant traffic headaches in the region as trucks carrying new cars, televisions and machinery transit through Finland and the Baltic nations.
Finland is now as large a trading partner for Russia as the United States because of the surging trans-border traffic, but customs posts on the border are continuously struggling to cope.

While Trucks are stuck at the border, retailers in Russia and the transport firms are losing money and local people are afraid to drive on the roads with one lane blocked by trucks.
Finland’s government said on Friday the Minister for Transport, Anu Vehvilainen, had again pleaded for the European Commission to influence Russia to reduce the traffic block by increasing electronic customs services, reducing border bureaucracy and developing roads on the Russian side.

Truck queues were about 50 km long on Sunday morning at Finland’s busiest border, Vaalimaa, east of Helsinki. They extended to more than 100 km late on Saturday, the Finnish Road Administration said.

“They now probably beat all records so far. A year ago the situation was similarly tough,” senior road administration official, Jukka Tamminen, told Reuters on Sunday.
Tamminen said he expected the queues to ease and nearly dissolve going into Christmas Eve, but before that they could still grow overnight.

The Finns blame the Russians for the queues which are also a problem in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Customs officials at Vaalimaa have said there were queues on 300 days last year.

Finland has raised the issue with Russia. The Nordic country’s President Tarja Halonen said after a meeting in September with Vladimir Putin that Russia had made decisions that would help improve border traffic but had not carried them out fully.

Russians prefer to import goods through Finland to minimise theft and because harbours near St Petersburg lack sufficient unloading equipment and warehouses.

Finnish customs have said they could double the amount of trucks that pass through as processing export papers takes only a couple of minutes. But procedures on the Russian side take longer.

The amount of goods imported through Finland has doubled since 2002 to about 3 million tonnes in 2006 and Russia’s Transport Ministry has admitted its officials cannot handle the growing number of vehicles.

The Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said earlier this month in an interview he was considering the introduction of a road tax for Russian trucks by 2011.

The Transport Ministry said in November it would charge Trucks to use a waiting area that will be built near the Russian border by the end of 2008.