Saturday, September 26, 2020
The EU’s bid to reform its migration policy has been met with mixed reactions from a number of countries with Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic outright opposing it. Zoltan Kovacs, the spokesman for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, said on Twitter the country’s stance on migration “has been clear and unchanged” since 2015. “We must ensure that the external borders of the EU and the Schengen Area remain perfectly…
It seems that the situation with the negotiations on the UK exit from the EU has reached a climax. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s team is stumped. The European Union categorically does not want to make any concessions. Meanwhile, the deadline is rapidly approaching. Talks between London and Brussels have reached the stage of threats to use economic measures to force Britain to surrender. The position of the European Union is…
In Latvia, 80.5% of the European Union (EU) funds available during this planning period have been invested in various projects, according to information compiled by the Ministry of Finance September 19. The planning period for these EU funds runs from 2014 to 2020. By August 1 this year, total investment project contracts of EU funds for €3.5 billion were concluded, representing 80.5% of the total amount of EU funds, or…
The Lithuanian government has agreed to contribute 2.5 million euros to the EU’s Emergency Support Instrument (ESI) to accelerate the creation of a Covid-19 vaccine. ESI funds are used to support potential vaccine producers, and finance part of development as well as production capacity costs. “This is not paying for the vaccine itself,” Health Minister Aurelijus Veryga told the Cabinet on Wednesday. “The European Commission is thus funding potential vaccine…
People arriving in Lithuania from Germany, Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, Norway, Iceland, Lichtenstein, Serbia and Canada will no longer be required to self-isolate as of Monday. As before, arrivals from Finland, Cyprus, Estonia, and Latvia will not need to isolate. The Lithuanian government has upped the self-isolation threshold from 16 to 25 cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 people, meaning that only people arriving from countries with more than 25 cases will…
While the coronavirus has monopolised public attention, another disease, tuberculosis, remains one of the biggest unsolved health problems in Lithuania. According to the World Health Organization, more than 55,000 people in Europe had tuberculosis (TB) in 2017. In Lithuania, there were 1,378 confirmed TB cases in 2017, 1,145 in 2018, and 1,058 in 2019. Although the situation in the country is improving, the change is too slow to catch up…
Norway will support the European Union’s sanctions targeted against the Minsk regime if efforts to achieve free elections in Belarus fail, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said in Vilnius on Tuesday. “Yes, I believe that if we don’t get that, we need to do sanctions against the Belarus regime. And that’s what Norway has said: we will support the European sanctions when they come, because we need to do this…
The EU’s lack of action over Belarus is undermining the credibility of its foreign policy, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius told the Financial Times newspaper in an interview published on Sunday. The EU needs to encourage democracy and counter Russia’s influence in Belarus, Linkevičius said, adding that the bloc should provide “concrete help” to help the opposition. “Sometimes we react too late and our measures are fragmented and aren’t making…
Lithuania and Estonia have been asking other EU member states to impose sanctions on Belarus’ embattled leader Alexander Lukashenko, Reuters reports quoting unnamed diplomatic sources. The Baltic states have already blacklisted Lukashenko and 29 other officials implicated in the continuing crackdown on Belarusian protesters and the opposition. The EU is also finalising a list of people to be placed under sanctions, but it is unlikely to include Lukashenko, according to…
The Lithuanian government has allocated over 50 million euros in EU funds for the country’s major hospitals and other healthcare institutions on the frontline of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. The decrees signed by Health Minister Aurelijus Veryga allow the hospitals to use the money to purchase new equipment, such as lung ventilators, functional beds, X-ray machines and other medical instruments and protective equipment, or reimburse them for earlier acquisitions.…
