Rail smugglers face dangerous crossings

A campaign conducted by Ukrainian law enforcement officers as part of the interdepartmental Operation Mainline caused quite a commotion at Kyiv’s central rail station. This time, all eyes were turned on three trains – Nos. 1, 41, and 47 – that had arrived from Moscow. Although the joint efforts of border guards, policemen, customs officers, and Ministry of Transport personnel could have produced better results, the organizers remained satisfied in principle much to the chagrin of the passengers who tried to use the railroad for personal gain.

This year has seen a host of large scale surprise raids aimed at seizing the so-called household contraband that still penetrates our borders. Although situated far enough from the state border, Kyiv is one of the main transshipment points for small-time smuggling. For instance, a previous operation managed to thwart several attempts of this kind, valued at over 280,000 hryvnias. This time also the cache was sizable. Passenger cars’ roof-to-ceiling space cached Venetian-blind-tape spools, boxes with foreign-made perfumery and cosmetics, video systems not cleared through customs, a large amount of printed advertisements, and some drums with a suspicious acid whose chemical composition is now being analyzed. As usual, the raiders failed to find the owners of the cached items, so the contraband was confiscated in favor of the state. A special decision will be made after the end of the inquiry about the articles seized because their owners failed to prove that they were lawfully taking them across the border.

The analysis made by State Border Security Committee and State Customs Service experts shows that such campaigns encourage border guards and customs officers, who deal with documents at checkpoints, to work more effectively. For example, two Russian ladies, who brought to Kyiv a large consignment of printed advertisements and electronic equipment for a specialized exhibition, failed to produce a proper customs declaration. The ladies claimed their cargo had been cleared at the Konotop customs office but for some reason they had been given no documents to confirm this. It is still to be clarified whether it this so and the inspectors themselves abused their rights.

Incidentally, to avoid any possible leak of information, the plan of this operation was signed at the very last moment, when the trains were already en route. A special group of inspectors came from the Zhytomyr border security unit just a few hours before the operation, while the customs, police, and railroad officers involved had not known each other before. Still, all the branches worked quite in unison.

Incidentally, Operation Mainline was proposed not by the law enforcement bodies but by such a totally peaceful agency as the Ministry of Transport. This operation is conducted by means of rapid pinpoint actions simultaneously in all check points and on all train routes or selectively in some of them. Another telling detail is that although the operation will last until the year’s end, only two hundred something hryvnias were spent to prepare it, while the total value of the seized contraband is close to a million.

“The current law severely limits the powers of the Border Security Force in Ukraine’s hinterland,” said Colonel Vitaly Antoniuk, deputy chief of border supervision and registration department at the State Border Security Committee, commenting to The Day on the course of the operation. “Only by establishing special interdepartmental groups were we able to conduct detailed inspections of trains at rail terminuses immediately before departure or after arrival. Now border guards, aided by highly skilled specialists from other departments, are capable of inspecting cars’ and locomotives’ structural cavities, high-voltage switchboard and storage-battery casings, and other difficult-to-access places which are difficult or even impossible to examine during a whistle stop at the border checkpoint.”

According to car conductors, “the bush telegraph” worked instantaneously as always. This means no items are going to be smuggled on trains, at least those bound for Moscow, in the nearest three to four days. But who knows where the “special squad” of Ukrainian officers will show up tomorrow?