Context: On the morning of December 17, 2025, Lithuanian road carriers whose heavy trucks had been stranded in Belarus after the border was closed received invoices for storing their trailers and cargo in special parking lots. This was reported by Erlandas Mikėnas, president of the Lithuanian National Road Carriers’ Association Linava. Carriers have to pay €120 for each day. For example, one company was billed nearly €14,000 for storing eight loads. If the carriers do not pay, Belarus will likely initiate confiscation proceedings.
On December 9, 2025, at a meeting of the Security Council, Alexander Lukashenko said Lithuania must meet a number of conditions before the stranded trucks can return: “Go ahead, take them. But give us back the 20 trucks, or 17, that you stole. The fire engines that were being shipped to Zimbabwe. Normalize the work of our sanatorium where we treated Chernobyl children. They have effectively taken the sanatorium away from the children. And give us back the money we invested there in building the port.”
The fire engines mentioned by Lukashenko were confiscated by Lithuania under sanctions, and the authorities intend to put them up for auction. The Belarus sanatorium in Druskininkai continues to operate, but whereas several thousand Belarusians used to go there each year on medical referrals, visa problems in recent years have cut that number to 700–800 people annually, with most guests now coming from the European Union.
As for the port, Belaruskali did invest $30 million in developing a terminal at the Port of Klaipeda and is now demanding $12 billion in compensation from Lithuania through international arbitration.
In the same speech, Lukashenko claimed that at least 30% of Lithuania’s budget had been generated by Belarusian cargo. The following day, December 10, 2025, a deputy of the House of Representatives Siarhei Klishevich repeated this claim on the talk show "Budni" on SBTV and Alpha Radio.
In reality, Belarusian cargo accounted for about 30% of Klaipeda port’s freight turnover, not 30% of Lithuania’s entire state budget revenue. Belarusian shipments made up roughly 20% of freight traffic on Lithuanian Railways. The ban on the transit of Belarusian potash has dealt a noticeable blow to Lithuania’s transport sector: the Port of Klaipeda lost 12% of its revenue, and Lithuanian Railways lost a quarter. However, these losses are due not only to the end of Belarusian transit, but also to a decline in Russian cargo.
At the same time, Belarus’s share in Lithuania’s overall exports of transport services did not exceed 6%. After sanctions against Belarus were introduced, Lithuania’s budget not only failed to collapse, but its revenues have grown year after year — in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
