Changes to border crossings may affect EU passengers on ‘new’ Warsaw-Moscow train

Third country nationals travelling on the Berlin-Moscow express train, which also stops in Warsaw, have increasingly been turned away by Russian border guards at the Belarus-Russian border, a Monday report in the Polish press stated. Poland’s ambassador to Russia, Vladimir Marciniak, said that although the Russians were “aware of the problem and informed [us] that they want to solve it as quickly,” they did not “declare the terms in which this issue could be resolved.” Third-country nationals – for example, EU nationals – on the Latvian-Russian and Ukrainian-Russian border crossings have also reportedly been turned away in recent months. In October, the EU representative office in Moscow recommended EU citizens cross the border with Russia from Ukraine and Belarus. In November, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said temporary points open to international traffic on the border between Belarus and Russia will arise. The so-called ‘new’ Moscow-Berlin train takes 20 hours to travel from Moscow to Berlin, in comparison with nearly 25 hours before the improvements to changing the rolling stock to accommodate different rail spacings between Poland and Russia/Belarus. It stops in Warsaw, Poznań and Rzepin.