Janis Vitenbergs
Ministry of Transport of the 10.02.2023 No 14-4/2023/840-1
Republic of Latvia
Gogola iela 3
LV-1743, Riga
Latvia
Letter in support of Ukraine
Dear Mr Janis Vitenbergs,
I am writing to you with significant concern regarding our joint support for Ukraine and our
opposition to the ongoing Russian military aggression in Ukraine.
Prior to the 24th of February 2022, the Estonian state-owned postal company Omniva had
significant commercial transit flows to Belarus and Russia. The situation changed dramatically on
the morning of February 24th with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In a matter of hours,
Omniva cut ties with all Russian customers, business entities and stopped serving all commercial
flows. To this day, Omniva provides only universal service obligation (USO) to Russia, in line
with Estonian’s obligations as a member of the United Nation’s UPU. Furthermore, in light of
hostile activities and Belarus’ strong support to the invasion, Omniva in April severed all ties also
with Belarus for commercial flows, maintaining only USO services.
All of these decisions were coordinated between the CEOs of national posts of Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania and Poland. Postal operators in our region have been unanimous in stating that no
commercial relations with the designated postal operators of these two countries shall be
continued. Furthermore, the members of PostEurop (a trade association headquartered in Brussels
representing 53 European postal operators) unanimously decided to suspended membership of
Russian and Belarussian Posts in the association at its most recent general assembly.
Sadly, I have been informed that Latvijas Pasts is still to this day actively delivering volumes not
originating or bound to Latvia to Russia and Belarus (commercial business). Omniva has raised
the issue at different levels with employees of Latvijas Pasts, including talks between the Heads
of International Business units, CEOs and in June the head of supervisory board of Omniva wrote
a letter to the head of the supervisory board of Latvijas Pasts. As yet, no conclusive answer has
been given to this issue.
I kindly ask You, as Minister responsible for postal services, to consider the moral and ethical
position of Latvia and its state owned entity Latvijas Pasts with regards to conducting business
with Belarus and Russia. Our ability to support Ukraine is linked with the pressure we can put on
the aggressors. As long as there is at least one country on the borders of Russia willing to do
Suur-Ameerika 1 / 10122 Tallinn / ESTONIA
Phone: +372 625 6342 / Fax: +372 631 3660 / E-mail:
[email protected] / http://www.mkm.ee
business with them our collective impact will be limited.
As an Estonian and a firm believer in European values I ask You to consider the values we
cherished during our independence fight in early 1990s and urge You to stop conducting business
with Russia and Belarus by a state owned entity of Latvia.
With best regards,
(signed digitally)
Kristjan Järvan
Minister of Entrepreneurship and Information Technology
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