A huge backup of truck traffic at the Russian-Kazakh border has started to ease, but Kazakh media outlets report that only vehicles suspected of being involved in improper schemes are crossing the frontier.

“Freight traffic resumed at the Kazakh-Russian border on November 1, but not for all,” reported the Orda.kz outlet, citing information originally published in a regional newspaper Uralskaya Nedelya.

Truck traffic started encountering especially lengthy delays at the Kazakh-Russian border in September. Officials have remained tight-lipped as the lines of waiting trucks continued to grow. More that 2,000 trucks are now stuck near Oral, also known as Uralsk, a city of almost 400,000 in northwestern Kazakhstan. “Many drivers have gone home, leaving their trucks loaded with goods,” the Orda report states. Many of the trucks are carrying Chinese-manufactured clothing and goods bound for Russian markets.

Pinpointing the source of the problem has proven difficult. Russian and Kazakh media outlets have traded accusations about the cause of the delays. Citing an unnamed logistics company owner, the Orda report indicates bribery may be at least partly responsible for creating the border bottleneck. Some trucking operators reportedly have paid a $700 “fee” in recent days to expedite customs clearance, according to Orda. 

This article first appeared on Eurasianet here.