Latvia donates cars to drunk drivers for war effort in Ukraine

By Andrius Sytas

RIGA, March 9 (Reuters) – Latvia started repossessing cars from drunk drivers this year and, as hundreds of vehicles began to fill seized vehicle depots, it decided to send them to Ukrainian army and hospitals.

On Wednesday, seven cars were driven through a snowstorm on a trailer and left a state depot bound for Ukraine.

In the Baltic country, which has 1.9 million inhabitants, two hundred cars have been withdrawn in two months from drivers with a blood alcohol level above 0.15%.

“The truth is that it’s very scary when you realize how many cars are driving around with drunk drivers,” said Reinis Poznaks, founder of the NGO known as “Twitter Convoy”, which the government has responsible for delivering the vehicles to Ukraine.

The 20 or so confiscated cars the state has promised to turn over to him each week for shipment to Ukraine will test the limits of his largely voluntary operation, Poznaks said.

“No one expected drunk people to drive so many vehicles, they can’t sell them as fast as people drink. That’s why I had the idea to send them to Ukraine,” explained Poznaks laughing when he found a Russian flag on one of the vehicles, confiscated, left behind by its owner.

“Twitter Convoy” has already shipped some 1,200 vehicles, after announcing a request for donations on Twitter days after the Russian invasion began on February 24 last year. It raised 2 million euros ($2.1 million) for the purchase of vehicles, renovations and logistics in 2022.

Latvian Finance Minister Arvils Aseradens said the NGO’s success prompted the government to abandon attempts to auction the vehicles: “We said, well, you can take these cars… and (Poznak) said, ‘Oh! Oh, that’s great!'”

“We are ready to do almost anything to support Ukrainians.”

In a police raid on Wednesday, in which four officers closed a Riga highway for half an hour to check all drivers for alcohol, no one was found intoxicated.

However, according to the police, 4,300 drivers exceeding the limit were detected on Latvian roads last year and in 2022 they were involved in nearly a thousand accidents.

(1 US dollar = 0.9476 euro)

(Reporting by Andrius Sytas and Janis Laizans; Spanish editing by Benjamín Mejías Valencia)