site.btaRegional Development Minister Discusses Border Checkpoints, Oil Pipeline, Motorways

Interviewed on bTV on Saturday, Regional Development Minister Ivan Shishkov talked about bottlenecks at Bulgaria's border checkpoints and motorways. The Lesovo-Hamzabeyli checkpoint on the border with Turkiye will be expanded and an expressway running to the Maritsa Motorway will be built, he said. 

Talking about the bottlenecks at Bulgaria's narrow border checkpoints, Shishkov said President Rumen Radev had already discussed a possible broadening of the Lesovo checkpoint with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In the future, there will be two large crossings, Kalotina (on the border with Serbia) and Lesovo, to handle the huge traffic.

The Ruse-Makaza Motorway, which will link the border with Romania on the Danube and Makaza Pass at the border with Greece, is just as important - it is a geopolitical motorway, the Regional Development Minister said.

He stressed that as soon as work on the Greece-Bulgaria gas interconnector was completed, President Radev started talks with his Greek counterpart on the Alexandroupolis-Burgas oil pipeline. Shishkov said it is very important because otherwise in a few years Bulgaria will have to pay steep prices for oil. He added that work on the project is under way at both expert and political level.

The old project will be resumed, but its direction will be reversed to supply oil to Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and other countries of the Black Sea basin, as Radev told Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou at a meeting on December 8, 2022.

Shishkov also commented that traffic on Bulgaria's motorways is very heavy because there are too few of them. There has been no strategy for the development of Bulgaria's infrastructure as a whole in the last 10 to 12 years, he said.