On the EU's frozen frontier with Belarus, Latvian border guards are in an uphill battle against the growing flow of contraband cigarettes smuggled into the bloc by organized crime groups.

"We confiscated 21 million illegal cigarettes from Belarus last year in this border sector alone," says Taivo Hanzens, deputy head of customs at the Paternieki border, one of the busiest crossings between the ex-Soviet state and the EU.

He adds that this is double the amount they seized in 2019: "The contraband is still on the rise."  

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More than 200 trucks a day cross into the EU at the border point. Hanzens says that border guards often find cigarettes hidden among their cargo, like bricks and roof tiles, or foodstuffs like pasta.

To address the issue, the Latvian checkpoint is hiring more customs officers and border guards to double the number of inspections. But the scale of the fight is immense.

State ties?

EU border forces seized 370 million illegal cigarettes in 2020 alone, according to the European anti-fraud agency OLAF. Around a third of them originated from non-EU Eastern European countries like Belarus.

One of the reasons the trade remains so profitable – and why so much of the contraband continues to flow over the EU border – is that cigarettes, heavily taxed in the EU, are priced much lower in Belarus.

Some critics have even accused close associates of the Belarusian government of actively benefiting from cigarette smuggling.

An investigative report by Warsaw-based TV station Belsat, the Naviny.by news website and Russian investigative website Proekt claims that one such beneficiary is Alexei Olexin, a long-term ally of Belarus President Alexander Lucashenko.  

According to the outlets, as of 2020, Olexin – who declined to comment on the report – controlled up to 40 percent of the Belarusian tobacco market. 

Only a third of the cigarettes produced in Belarus are thought to be consumed in the country, which means there is a vast surplus for both legal and illegal export.

Latvian border guards say the smugglers buy cigarettes in Belarus in bulk and move them across the border into Latvia, from where they are then shipped to Western Europe. 

In their investigation, the journalists highlight Olexin's nominal ownership of Belneftegaz, the company which oversees the national traffic transit monitoring system for tracking the movement of trucks across Belarus's borders.

But Belarus's cigarette smugglers don't confine themselves to road traffic.

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Inventive smuggling

In the Latvian border town of Indra, not far from Paternieki, customs agents search cargo trains before they head further into the EU.

The Latvian border authorities say tobacco contraband can be tucked away in bulk shipments of wood pulp or coal, but they say the smugglers are getting more inventive.

The contrabandists are now apparently using metal claws with remote-controlled electromagnets to hold boxes of tobacco under the rolling stock.

After crossing the EU but before inspection at Indra station, the claws fall off, giving smugglers the opportunity to retrieve the cigarettes – although sometimes the officers are faster and beat them to it.

Smugglers also use the Daugava river, which flows from Belarus into Latvia, to carry the cigarette boxes into the EU via makeshift rafts and barrels.

"We have caught many rafts consisting of cigarette boxes, complete with a GPS device," says Aigars Stelmaks, chief of the border guard station in Piedruja.

"[They] are then covered with tree branches, trunks, reeds and other natural camouflage, making the whole thing look like the usual floating trash."

When the river is frozen, border guards use snowmobiles to patrol for smugglers, who can simply walk over the ice and into Latvia carrying boxes of cigarettes.

"Snow makes our work easier: if we see footprints in the snow, we can track them," Stelmaks says.

The guards add that when the publicly accessible river isn't frozen, some smugglers pretend to be fishermen.

He added: "We suspect that a number of local residents from smaller villages on the Latvian shore are participants in the smuggling as well."