Via Carpathia route to be ready by end-2025 -- minister

Polish Infrastructure Minister Andrzej Adamczyk declared on Saturday that the Via Carpathia route will be ready by the end of 2025. He made the statement in Niemce, south-eastern Poland, where he spoke about a tender for the construction of its new stretch.

"This road is becoming a reality. Law and Justice's programme announced that the Via Carpathia road would be ready by 2025. And today we can be sure that it will be ready at the turn of 2025, by the end of 2025," he said.

He recalled that the idea to build the route was authored by the late President Lech Kaczynski, and added that it was also part of the Three Seas initiative proposed by President Andrzej Duda. "Via Carpathia will be a driving engine of development. This is how it is perceived by the Three seas countries," he stated.

The Three Seas covers 12 countries lying between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic seas.

The tender for the construction of a 23-kilometre-long stretch of the S19 expressway from Lublin to Lubartow, south-eastern Poland, will soon be announced. The S19 expressway is planned as the main North-East transportation route in eastern Poland and as part of the Via Carpathia route running from Klaipeda and Kaunas in Lithuania through Bialystok, Lublin, Rzeszow in eastern Poland, Kosice in Slovakia, Debrecen in Hungary, and farther to Romania, Bulgaria and Greece.