More than two months after Belarus allowed detained Lithuanian trucks to leave the country, up to 200 vehicles, including tractor units and semi-trailers, remain there. This was reported by Erlandas Mikėnas, president of the Lithuanian road carriers’ association Linava, LRT reported, citing ELTA.
According to him, it is simply not economically viable to retrieve some of the vehicles because storage fees exceed the value of the trucks themselves.
“It is not worthwhile to retrieve all vehicles because the so-called storage fee exceeds their value. Other carriers are raising funds and still hope to get their trucks back,” he said.
The fee for one truck-and-trailer combination is about 6,000 euros.
“There is a high probability that they will remain there,” the association head said.
According to Giedrius Mišutis, a representative of Lithuania’s State Border Guard Service, the agency does not monitor and has no data on how many trucks remain in Belarus. He said that since March 23, when stranded trucks were allowed to return, up to 1,000 tractor units have crossed the border.
“As of April 28, 916 trucks had returned. In the final days when we were still recording these flows, one or two trucks crossed daily. At that point there was no need to keep count, so we do not know exactly how many returned. Their number may have reached 1,000,” he said.
According to him, truck traffic through Medininkai and Šalčininkai has declined, but the checkpoints continue to operate normally. Queues have decreased significantly compared with the pre-crisis period. Whereas trucks previously waited for days, the current waiting time at Medininkai is two to four hours, while at Šalčininkai there are periods with no queues at all. Every day, between 120 and 180 trucks leave Medininkai for Belarus, while 40 to 100 trucks depart from Šalčininkai.
Mikėnas said freight volumes have fallen to a minimum because cargo flows have been redirected through Poland.
Belarus had been holding trucks with Lithuanian registration plates since the autumn of 2025 in response to Lithuania’s closure of the border. Belarusian authorities placed the vehicles in designated paid parking areas and prevented them from leaving for several months. Belarus allowed the trucks to depart from March 23 following talks between Aliaksandr Lukashenka and U.S. presidential special envoy John Coale. Carriers are allowed to retrieve their vehicles after paying the parking fees.
According to Belarusian authorities, more than 1,900 vehicles, including tractor units, trailers and semi-trailers, were being held in parking facilities across Belarus.
Earlier, Uladzimir Arlouski, chairman of Belarus’s State Customs Committee, said that Belarus intended to resolve the issue of Lithuanian trucks by the end of May. According to him, nearly 1,700 Lithuanian freight vehicles had left Belarus, where they had been held since November 2025.
