Kazakhstan redirects its freight from ports of Russia to Latvia
Due to the EU sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, some shippers have faced delays in moving their freight abroad via the Russian ports. As a result, they are forced to look for new logistics solutions to export their goods. One of them is to redirect freight volumes that have been blocked in Russia to European countries such as Latvia.
90 per cent of export from Kazakhstan runs via the ports of Russia. Starting from early March when the European Union imposed sanctions on Russia, many European ports including Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg suspended the handling operations of freight from the Russian harbours. This has also resulted in delays for shippers from Kazakhstan. “Because of the implementation of a package of anti-Russian sanctions and the absence of new mechanisms for determining the country of origin of goods, there are facts of delays in a number of seaports of Kazakh cargo running transit via Russia to the markets of the EU countries,” the Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure Development of Kazakhstan reported.
Therefore, the government of Kazakhstan decided to redirect some volumes of export goods, which got stuck in Russia, from the ports of Saint Petersburg, Ust-Luga, Novorossiysk to the harbours of Latvia (Riga, Ventspils, Liepaja). Such an agreement was concluded by the dedicated ministries of the two countries in the past week. “We have got approval from the seaports of Latvia. The Latvian side provided the capacities and throughput of the Latvian harbours to us as well as declared the readiness to receive goods from Kazakhstan,” the Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure Development of Kazakhstan added. Meanwhile, both parties have not disclosed the exact volumes which were or will be redirected from Russia to Latvia.