OREANDA-NEWS. October 23, 2009. Transport ministers from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland signed a declaration, on 19 October, in which they commit to realisng the Rail Baltica railway project (Warsaw-Kaunas-Riga-Tallinn-Helsinki axis), despite the difficulties associated with the economic and financial crisis.

This project is one of the priority projects of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T). In their declaration, the ministers commit to seeking new "technical and financial" solutions to allow trains to travel at an average speed of 120 km/hour along the entire Rail Baltica axis by 2013. The current network, built according to Russian standards, is much slower, with speed limits of 40-60 km/hour on certain sections.