Lithuania has taken samples of grain that was supposed to have come from Russia. By the time laboratories in three countries determine its origin, the ship will be long gone

Lithuania's State Food and Veterinary Service took samples last Thursday at a customs warehouse in the port of Klaipėda from a grain shipment that, according to the accompanying documents, was supposed to have come from Russia. The authorities suspect that it in fact came from Ukraine and reached the West via the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Only a laboratory analysis will give the answer, and that will take two to three weeks. LRT ↗

Over the following five days, all three Baltic states joined the issue one after another. On Monday the Lithuanian minister of agriculture expanded the checks and the State Security Department announced the expulsion of 22 Belarusians, on Tuesday the Lithuanian prime minister spoke up, and on Wednesday the Estonian prime minister and the head of Latvia's Food and Veterinary Service. Together it adds up to a picture of a single conflict waged through trade documents, port cranes and satellite navigation.

How it can be proved which field the grain grew in

How it is actually proved which field grain grew in was explained by the director general of Latvia's Food and Veterinary Service, Māris Balodis, in an interview for Latvijas Radio. His agency wants to obtain the right to inspect transit cargo in Latvian ports, something it has not done so far because the European Union does not require it. LSM ↗

The method is isotope analysis and trace element analysis. "We will have the right to take samples of grains to determine their possible geographical origin through isotope and trace element analysis." "There is an isotope map of a specific country available, which allows us to determine whether products, in this case grains, come from a specific region," Balodis said. The Ukrainian isotope map for grain was created by the British DEFRA laboratory together with Ukrainian colleagues.

In practice this means a journey across three countries. "We will take samples, analyze them in France, France will send them to England, and then we will receive an answer whether grains that match the Ukrainian profile have been detected," Balodis described the procedure. One inspection is to cost 900 to 1,000 euros and will be paid by the owners of the cargo, and in advance. Whoever refuses the advance payment will not cross the Latvian border; whoever pays it may continue on their way.

And here is the core of the problem. According to Balodis, roughly a month passes from the taking of the sample to the result, even longer than the two to three weeks the Lithuanians expect for the sample from Klaipėda. The specific shipment will long since be somewhere else by then. But the agency will know who transported it and where it came from. "This will be a reason for making other decisions in the future at the European Union level," Balodis says. The inspection is therefore not meant to stop the ship it is checking, but to obtain evidence against the next ones.

Estonia says not a single grain has passed through its ports

The Estonian side, however, says there is nothing to catch. Pavel Prokopenko, spokesman for the Tax and Customs Board, said that since the beginning of the full-scale invasion no grain has been imported into Estonia from Russia, nor has any transited through the country. Grain of Russian origin is moreover subject to high tariffs on import into the Union, so it is not economically worthwhile for an importer. ERR ↗

Prime Minister Kristen Michal nevertheless considers it an issue. "Estonia's position is clear: We do not consider it acceptable for Russia to use Estonian ports to export its grain. Russia bears sole responsibility for the security situation in the Black Sea, which has seriously disrupted both Ukrainian and Russian grain exports. It would be cynical if Russia were simultaneously able to reroute its grain exports through Baltic ports," he wrote for ERR.

So why are three governments dealing with something that, according to Estonian customs officers, is not happening? There are two reasons. The first is the change of route. Since Ukrainian attacks have largely halted Russian shipments across the Black Sea, Russia has, according to ERR, increased grain transit across the Baltic Sea. So far this involves its own ports, but that is precisely why the Baltic governments are watching whether the flow shifts to them. The second reason is capacity. Logistics expert Raivo Vare told ERR that Estonia has capacity for five and a half million tonnes of grain, Latvia two to three million and Lithuania similarly. The grain terminal in Muuga east of Tallinn has deep-water berths where large grain carriers can dock, something the shallower-draught Lithuanian and Latvian ports cannot handle. In his view the Baltic ports are logistically better positioned than the Russian ones for markets across the Atlantic and in East Africa.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius therefore said in Klaipėda that shipments would not pass through the port there "uncontrolled" and that he had spoken by phone with his Latvian counterpart about the matter. "The issue concerns not just Lithuania as a state; in this case, we are talking about three states - Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania," he added. LRT ↗

Lithuania says the 2025 scheme has a hole

A control mechanism has in fact existed for more than a year. Since May 2025, Lithuania, Ukraine and the United Kingdom have been running the so-called Grain Verification Scheme, under which feed grain stored in customs warehouses is subject to mandatory laboratory testing.

The Lithuanian Ministry of Agriculture, however, warned that changes in the monitored flows suggest circumvention. According to the ministry, some shipments may be moving through simplified direct transit procedures or are declared as food-grade grain, to which the checks do not apply. Agriculture Minister Kęstutis Mažeika therefore formally asked the service to verify the origin of all grain from Russia and Belarus regardless of the declared use. "We must do everything to ensure that our country's infrastructure is not used for the transit of stolen Ukrainian grain," he said. LRT ↗

Satellites for tractors and threats to arms makers

That agriculture is not a marginal topic in this conflict was also shown by a second Lithuanian case from the same week. The State Security Department (VSD) announced on Monday that it had declared 22 Belarusian citizens working for a technology company a threat to national security. They lost their residence permits, were expelled and received a five-year ban on entering the Schengen area. LRT ↗

The company took part in a project of the European Union Agency for the Space Programme and was supposed to develop high-precision satellite navigation receivers for Galileo, intended for guiding agricultural machinery and for precision agriculture. An investigation by the European Public Prosecutor's Office and the Lithuanian financial crime service found that the company had concealed ties to the Russian and Belarusian military industry. The project had a budget of more than one million euros, of which the agency financed more than 745,000, and the company actually received 447,272 euros. Last week the Vilnius Regional Court convicted two Belarusian citizens of fraud.

On the Latvian side there was a third case. A pro-Russian group signing itself as Global Citizens Against War 1984 sent threats to the governments of Latvia, Poland and Portugal, demanding a halt to arms supplies to Ukraine. It told two Latvian defence industry companies, Unitruck and Eraser, that it would stop their activities by any means if they did not cease supplying Ukraine by 7 October. LSM ↗

The Latvian Constitution Protection Bureau said, according to Latvijas Radio, that the aim is to sow fear and uncertainty, to bolster the group's own image and thereby indirectly slow down aid to Ukraine. The bureau refrained from further comment on the grounds that it would itself amplify the effect of the message. Jānis Karlsbergs, chairman of the board of the Latvian Transatlantic Organisation, called it a psychological operation in a radio programme and recalled that there had already been a fire at Latvia's Museum of the Occupation and that IKEA stores had burned in Poland.

The border, migrants and the Dutch minister

The fourth event took place on the same Wednesday at the Latvian-Russian border in Terehova, where Foreign Minister Baiba Braže arrived together with Dutch Foreign Minister Tom Berendsen. Braže described the instrumentalisation of migrants by Belarus and Russia as an organised hybrid threat to the whole of Europe and called for the Union, alongside the large sanctions packages, to regularly adopt targeted restrictions against companies and supply channels that help Russia produce missiles and drones. Diena ↗

Both ministers agreed that the Union's next multiannual budget needs to earmark money for eastern border infrastructure. Braže also thanked the Netherlands for its willingness to host the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine and praised its contribution to the region's defence, from the German-Dutch corps responsible for NATO ground forces in Latvia and Estonia to airspace patrols.

Read also: Dutch transport workers went on strike over disability benefits. Trains stood still for 24 hours and the government kept quiet about having already withdrawn the cuts

The limits of this view

All four stories come from Baltic public service media and from the Latvian daily Diena, that is, from countries that see themselves as the front line. That is a legitimate lens, but it is a lens, not a neutral view from outside. None of the four events has so far been picked up by Slovak or Czech media.

More importantly, even within the Baltics themselves there is no consensus on the level of threat. Deividas Matulionis, chief national security adviser to Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda, said on 4 September that Lithuanian services do not see an increased threat from the Belarusian side. "I specifically made additional inquiries today, and our services have no such information. As of today, we do not see an increased threat from the Belarusian side," he said, adding that while Russian military facilities do exist in Belarus, intelligence has not detected any new manoeuvre units that would directly threaten Lithuania, Latvia or Poland. He was responding to claims by Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya that new military infrastructure is being built in Belarus. LRT ↗

The grain question itself also remains open. The suspicion from Klaipėda has not been confirmed so far and Estonian customs data speak of zero transit. Without the result of the isotope analysis it is premature to claim that stolen Ukrainian grain is flowing through Baltic ports. So far the only thing demonstrated is that three governments have decided to look down this route before anything is proven.

Ilustračná fotka: transhipment cranes and a cargo ship at Estonia's Muuga port near Tallinn in an archive photograph. Author Guillaume Speurt, Wikimedia Commons, licence CC BY-SA 2.0. The image has been downscaled.

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