“If you drive drunk, we will take your car and send it to Ukraine.”
That could be the motto of an awareness campaign for drivers in Latvia, one of the European countries with the highest incidence of cases of people driving while intoxicated: about 3,500 a year, according to the Public Broadcasting network. of Latvia (LSM, for its acronym in Latvian).
The slogan is not real, but it reflects a true situation: Latvian authorities have started sending seized cars from drivers caught while driving under the influence of alcohol to Ukraine.
This initiative, which is intended to support Ukraine’s war efforts, is actually an unexpected consequence of a new law passed in late 2022 that states that drivers caught with 1.5mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood ( three times the legal limit) the vehicle could be seized and later sold by the government.
From the auction to Ukraine
The entry into force of the law led to a notable increase in the number of impounded vehicles that have quickly filled the parking lots available to the state to deposit them.
As a consequence, the authorities committed to delivering some two dozen cars a week to Twitter Convoy, a Latvian NGO that sends donated vehicles to Ukraine.
“No one expected that people would drive so many cars while intoxicated,” Reinis Poznaks, founder of this organization, told Reuters.
“They can’t sell them as fast as [el ritmo al que] people are drinking. That’s how the idea came to me: to send them to Ukraine,” she added.
Last month, the initiative won the approval of the Latvian Parliament, which gave the green light for these now state-owned cars to be donated to hospitals and the Ukrainian military.
This Wednesday the first eight seized cars that will be sent to Ukraine left one of these state parking lots in Riga.
These vehicles have a combined value of about $22,000, according to the Latvian website Delfi.
Paradoxically, one of these cars had a Russian flag attached to it, according to the Reuters agency.
And it is that around 25% of the Latvian population are people who have Russian roots.
In fact, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Latvian authorities had to move quickly to ban dozens of websites that they determined were disseminating Kremlin propaganda.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly tried to justify his offensive against Ukraine on the grounds that he wants to protect Russian-speaking people living in that country.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-64909288, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-09 19:00:07
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