Rail Baltica

I mean, again, when he became prime minister, he wasn't a super well-known commodity in Latvia.

And for people who had heard of him before, Usually they had heard of him because of his very harsh criticisms of Air Baltic and then also Rail Baltic, which we will not be talking about this time, thankfully.

That is the major rail infrastructure project to connect the three Baltic capitals with Western Europe's high-speed rail infrastructure.

So the major update is that after significant amount of speculation as to what will happen with AirBaltic, because again, when Anders Kuhlberg came in as prime minister, he did pledge that there would be no more financial aid for AirBaltic until there was a significant change in their business plan, which we talked about, I believe, on the previous episode.

And I mean, part of this comes from the government as well, because we need to build, to build these, um, defense, as we call, villages for, for, for just defense spending, which is also booming, uh, here in Lithuania, but also other Baltic states.

At the same time, we do have, um, other projects such as Rail Baltica, that are also happening full speed right now.

When we talk to construction companies here in Lithuania, they say that they're working, like, 100% full capacity.

Right.

He was a not very particularly well-known in terms of wider society.

For people who follow politics very closely, they knew him as one of the loudest critics of the Rail Baltic Project, which...

I do not want to talk about Rail Baltic right now.

It's the very depressing public infrastructure project to connect the three Baltic capitals with high-speed rail to the rest of Europe's high-speed rail infrastructure that has not gone very well.