EC vows extra funding for Rail Baltica project – Lithuanian committee chair

  • 2022-09-16
  • BNS/TBT Staff

VILNIUS - The European Commission vows to provide additional funding for the construction of Rail Baltica, a pan-Baltic billion-worth railway project.

Last summer, the Commission allocated more than 350 million euros for the project and plans to continue doing so in the future, says Radvile Morkunaite-Mikuleniene, chair of Lithuania's parliamentary Committee on European Affairs.

Attending the committee's closed-door meeting on Friday, Catherine Trautmann, the European coordinator of the North-Sea Baltic TEN-T corridor, promised that the Commission would provide additional funding for the successful completion of the railway project following a drastic increase in raw material and energy prices due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, the committee chair said.

"Clearly, we still have to justify the increased costs to the European Commission, but I am personally inspired by the Commission's own attitude towards the importance of this project and its speedy completion," Morkunaite-Mikuleniene told BNS after the committee meeting.

The meeting was also attended by Arenijus Jackus, strategy and business development director from LTG Infra, the infrastructure management arm of Lietuvos Gelezinkeliai (Lithuanian Railways, LTG), the country's state-owned railway company, who is responsible for the Rail Baltica project.

In his words, the EC representative's week-long visit to Finland and the Baltic states confirms that Rail Baltica is one of the most important transport infrastructure projects among the 135 projects currently funded by the EU.

"Rail Baltica is among the trans-European transport network's priority projects underway in EU member states. This is also evident from the additional funding of 357 million euros provided by the European Commission this summer and also from the visit of this coordinator and the given attention," he added.