Ai confini dell’Europa
At the Edge of Europe INGLESE ENGLISH
by Alessandro Manfridi
When the *limes* manifests as a border, and the standoff between sides has a negative and unjust impact on the movement of civilians traveling for humanitarian reasons…
September 11, 2026
“Wake up, we’re the only ones left here!” my wife says, rousing me from a deep sleep on a bus where the seats are so cramped we feel like sardines. I look around. Pitch darkness. An almost surreal atmosphere. Our bus has emptied out; the passengers have vanished—simply evaporated. Only the two of us remain, along with the young man traveling with us and one other unsuspecting adult. Even the driver has slipped away, leaving the doors open so anyone who wants to can leave. I tell my wife: “We need to get off, too! And quickly!”
Belarus-Poland border crossing, Brest-Terespol, August 16, 2026. It is 5:00 AM, Belarus time.
“Grab the bags! Come on, we have to get off!” With a mix of anxiety and determination, we hurry to take our backpacks down from the bus cabin and retrieve our suitcases from the luggage compartment. Then, without delay, we start walking along the road, making our way up the line of buses—engines off, sitting silent as if in a graveyard—past them one by one, heading toward the customs barriers. At first, there isn’t a soul in sight; the vehicles, like ours, have been abandoned by their passengers. The atmosphere is surreal. I counted 53 vehicles between ours and the front of the line; when we left ours, there were three more behind us. Upon reaching the first bus, I ask: “Are you going to Warsaw? Do you have room for three people?” “Sure! Documents!” And cash, of course—plenty of euros per person. The ride costs more than the ticket itself.
It is 6:00 AM. Another hour of waiting in front of the barriers. Then we move forward, park, take a bathroom break, and wait for the first customs checkpoint. At 10:30 AM, we cross the Belarusian border checkpoint on foot. Back on the bus, we wait to clear Polish (i.e., “European”!) customs. At 4:21 PM, we clear passport and luggage control at the Polish checkpoint. At 5:47 PM, we finally set off again. And finally—at long last—we arrive at the Warsaw Zachodnia bus station at 8:30 PM.
This time, our journey took a total of 23 hours.
The drive from Minsk to Warsaw takes about six hours: three to reach the border at Brest and another three from the border to the Polish capital. We set off at 9:30 PM, expecting to reach the border by 1:00 AM and Warsaw by 8:00 AM; instead, the driver made two stops, citing the need for a restroom break. We arrived at 3:00 AM and stopped in the dead of night. We were so overcome by sleep that we missed the other passengers getting off. That is how, at 5:00 AM, we gathered our things without hesitation and headed toward customs.
This time, we weren’t caught off guard. The first time we experienced this “trick”—two winters ago—it was a very unpleasant ordeal. We didn’t know what to do and all had to head into the woods among the trees, as there were no restrooms nearby. Eventually, we realized what was happening and set off on foot, suitcases and luggage in tow, through the snow. Since then, we try to cross the border via Lithuania—which is further north—when entering or leaving Belarus, though that route, too, is unpredictable.
Once, in Vilnius, the bus we had booked was delayed by 24 hours because it was stuck in the queue at the border; we had to buy new tickets to head back and travel via the Warsaw-Terespol route instead. Another time, the Lithuanian computer system crashed and there was no information available; the trip was eventually cancelled, and we were told the next bus wouldn’t leave for two days, forcing us to turn back and opt—once again—for the Warsaw route. On another occasion, we arrived in Vilnius from Minsk at 3:00 a.m. and walked to our hotel—to avoid spending the night on a bench—passing through a pitch-black, rather unsettling patch of woods. We spotted a parked taxi and wanted to take it, only to realize the driver was completely drunk and heading in the opposite direction from the hotel! I can still hear my wife shouting loudly; her voice snapped him out of his stupor, and he got back on the right track.
Another lesson we learned the hard way: never buy return tickets to Italy from Warsaw or Vilnius in advance, because the delays encountered at customs mean you’ll end up missing your connection. It is best to buy them only after clearing the final checkpoint and crossing the border. As of August 2026, there are a total of five open and operational land border crossings for entering Belarus from Poland and Lithuania (three on the Polish border and two on the Lithuanian one). Six years ago (in 2020), by contrast, there were about fourteen official, open crossings (six with Poland and eight with Lithuania).
To enter Belarus today—since air travel is no longer an option due to EU sanctions—if one wishes to avoid the mandatory overland bus route, it is necessary to purchase a flight to Minsk that connects via Istanbul or one of the former Soviet republics (excluding the Russian Federation, of course, as EU sanctions apply to Moscow as well)—such as routes from Italy to Yerevan (Armenia), Tbilisi (Georgia), or Baku (Azerbaijan)—followed by a second flight to Minsk.
This approach bypasses the overland border crossing issue, but the cost of such flights is beyond many people’s means. Consequently, those wishing to enter Belarus have no choice but to travel overland by bus. In a best-case scenario, the crossing takes under ten hours; in the worst case, some travelers have spent as long as 48 hours there. This absurd situation—which caught us completely off guard the first time, and left us merely annoyed and resigned this time—was interrupted by a thought that crossed my mind: “Faced with this dire situation—paying more than double the fare—shouldn’t we actually be grateful for this system?” After all, had we not done this, with 53 buses lined up, we likely would have spent far longer than 48 hours in that wretched state.
The drivers profit from it, yet it is a well-oiled system. This second bus was empty when we arrived and gradually filled up with passengers from buses that pulled in behind us. Everyone ends up happy: the passengers—who avoid spending 48 hours on their original buses—and the drivers—who get to fill their vehicles twice over as soon as they reach the front of the line. The system thus appears flawless—fitting for a situation that seems to be veering off course and losing all sense of reason.
In most countries around the world, such “hardships” are the rule rather than the exception. Regarding transport, for instance, it is said that at bus stations in Africa, passengers wait idly, remarking: “No one knows when the bus will arrive; all we know is that it will arrive and then depart.” Yet for us “civilized” Europeans—who view our societies as the cradle of democracy, rights, and progress—it would be honest to call an experience like this by its true name. At the “edges of Europe,” Belarusian citizens (and we along with them) are victims of hardship, commerce, sanctions, and the grueling journeys forced upon them across borders created by the logic of weaponry and division. We have written about this before, but we wish to reiterate that these hardships—and others—are collateral consequences of the situation imposed on people by this conflict and these sanctions.