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Lithuanian customs intercepted military goods leaving the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
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It said the supplies were voluntary donations intended for the Russian military. It handed them over to Ukraine.
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Lithuania, once part of the Soviet Union, is one of Ukraine’s largest donors in terms of GDP.
Lithuanian customs officials say they have intercepted shipments of military goods headed by rail to Moscow – and sent them directly to Ukraine.
Customs officials inspect carriages at Lithuania’s southwestern border said that between September 27 and October 2, they found packages containing camouflage pants and nets in four separate shipments.
They said the trains were running from Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave on the borders with Lithuania and Poland, to Moscow.
The officials said the cargo was classified as military and required a special permit, and that the shipments were likely sent by Russian volunteer groups trying to support President Vladimir Putin’s war effort.
It is not the first incident to occur on the trans-Lithuanian railway line between Kaliningrad and Moscow.
According to the Kiev Independent it is One train carriage was recently engraved with a ‘Z’ – the symbol used by the Russian military – and another with the message that Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, is a ‘Russian city’.
Lithuania, once part of the Soviet Union, has been one of Ukraine’s closest allies.
In terms of aid to Ukraine as a percentage of GDP, it ranks behind only Denmark and Estonia, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s aid tracker.
The tracker said that between the start of the large-scale invasion in February 2022 and June this year, Lithuania had sent $812 million in military aid and $110 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine, amounting to 1.43% of Lithuania’s GDP .
While the U.S. has sent much more — about $75 billion in combined military, humanitarian and financial aid in the same time frame — that amount represents about 0.35% of U.S. GDP, according to the tracker.
In March, Lithuania’s Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said told Business Insider: “If Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, then what happens next is the problem of Europe in general.”
Lithuania is one of many NATO countries bordering Russia preparing for a possible Russian invasionby increasing their military spending and building a defense mechanism line along the shared 1,000-mile border between Russia and Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.
Read the original article Business insider
