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Several bus company routes, like on infobus.eu, take between 3 and 4 hours. Trains from Warsaw to Białystok take about 1.5 to 2 hours. This has the advantage of allowing comfortable train journeys with minimal time spent on a bus. Also, the Terespol-Brest border might have shorter queues if you still prefer a Warsaw-Brest bus.

Note that another route to Minsk, if you have a paper Russian or Belarusian visa, is the Kaliningrad-Minsk train. It’s long—around ten or eleven hours—but you can lie down and sleep. An option if you fly into Gdańsk and then take a short bus to Kaliningrad.

There are also Belavia flights from Minsk to Kaliningrad, but they’re expensive. The route is scenic:

In any case, this adds a few more options compared to what’s been available over the last four years.

Single Russia-Belarus visa and new train routes

by Esantirulo · 2026-06-03 · 36 replies

Since last year, the unification of the Russian visa with Belarus has been in effect. For reference, EU citizens haven’t needed a visa for Belarus for two years. However, it wasn’t possible to travel to Russia. Only Belarusian and Russian citizens could move freely within the union.

With the unified system, if you enter one of the two countries with a visa from either, you can now travel between them freely.

In the case of a Russian visa, it must be a paper visa glued into your passport—not an electronic visa.

This opens up the possibility of traveling to Russia from Lithuania via Minsk, for example, starting from Vilnius.

It also allows for travel circuits that would otherwise be difficult, despite the proximity of the cities.

So, I’m leaving on June 12th for Vilnius. A one-hour flight for around thirty euros with a carry-on bag, and from Vilnius Airport, there’s a bus to Minsk. My planned route for now is Vilnius-Minsk-Smolensk-Vitebsk-Polotsk-Pskov-Riga.

This crosses the Belarus-Russia border three times: from Minsk to Smolensk, then from Smolensk to Vitebsk, and finally from Polotsk to Pskov.

The region of this itinerary was, a thousand years ago, essentially that of the Krivichs, a local Slavic political entity. The term comes from "blood," *krew* in Polish, *krov* in Russian—basically "blood brothers." In Latvian, the word for Russians is *krievu*, by the way. Historically, the region corresponds to some of the old Russian principalities. Later, what marks Belarusian regions in general is, after the Great Schism of 1054, the division between Catholic and Orthodox zones, particularly as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth expanded and contracted. In architecture, this corresponds to variations in Baroque styles, for example.

Vitebsk is known in France as the birthplace of Chagall. Born Russian, he first trained at the art school in Vitebsk, which was also attended by Malevich and Lissitzky, before completing his studies in Saint Petersburg, then moving to Berlin and later Paris. In Paris, Chagall met Cendrars, who had spent three years in Russia before and spoke enough Russian to help the newcomer get by a bit.

Back to the practical travel aspects: a local Pskov newspaper mentions that the Russian and Belarusian governments have a project for a Pskov-Polotsk train line. Previously, there were also plans for lines between Veliky Luki and Vitebsk, and Polotsk. A recently launched railway is Smolensk-Vitebsk, shown in white on the map, with projected lines in blue. https://pln-pskov.ru/society/583817.html https://pln-pskov.ru/society/578335.html

These will likely be "Hirondelle"—that is, *Lastochka*—the fast, spacious regional trains in Russia. Currently, all of this is done by bus, so the train is a very appealing and comfortable option. We’ll see how it goes.

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