Lithuania’s Smuggling Crackdown Turns Inward: The Hunters Have Caught Themselves

Vilnius, 29 May 2026 — For the first time, Lithuanian authorities have publicly commented on last week’s dramatic arrests of their own law-enforcement personnel in a high-profile corruption and smuggling scandal.

General Commissioner of Police Arūnas Paulauskas acknowledged that the “cancer of corruption” has eaten deep into the heart of multiple state institutions, and that the true scale of the problem may still be impossible to fully assess.

“From December last year alone we have detained more than 60 people, of whom around 30 — perhaps 27 — have been arrested,” Paulauskas said. “The numbers are unquestionably very large. This is not the work of criminal police alone. Border guards have their own operational units, and there is also the customs criminal service.”

He explained that criminal police stepped in after realising they could dismantle the Lithuanian end of the operation — those who receive the contraband “balls” of cigarettes, distribute them and sell them on the domestic market.

At present, roughly fifteen law-enforcement officers are behind bars. The emerging picture suggests that low-level operatives have been arrested first, while the real masterminds — possibly senior figures across several state agencies — remain higher up the chain.

The scandal reaches into the highest levels of Lithuanian politics. Former Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis is suspected of presiding over a vast corruption empire with a turnover estimated at €1.5 billion.

Another ex-premier, Gintautas Paluckas, has also come under investigation, with authorities seizing his property.

Cigarette smuggling remains an extraordinarily lucrative business, generating 200–300 percent profit margins — a golden goose that few believe could have operated for so long without powerful protection at the very top.

Earlier this year, Lithuania’s chief border guard admitted that more than half of all illegal tobacco entering the country comes from neighbouring Latvia. The trail, it seems, has now led straight back to Vilnius.

As the old investigative adage goes: the greatest danger is that you will eventually find yourself. In Lithuania’s war on smugglers, the authorities appear to have done exactly that.