Where will we make Europe?
Ukrainian borders are moving toward the West
The new concept of Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service is devoted to Euro-integration. It is not just a matter of Ukraine’s strivings to join the EU. First of all, there is still much to be learned. Second, borders are a continent-wide issue. The principal tasks of the border guards are not to allow illegal migrants into Ukraine and to prevent arms and drug smuggling, and human trafficking. Exchanges of these “goods” are taking place between all European countries, so all affected countries are interested in seeing order on their neighbors’ borders.
Employees of the State Border Guard Service say that as recently as three years ago they had nothing but a submachine gun, a dog, and an UAZ, a vehicle made by the Ulianov Automobile Plant. “Because there was no financing, professionals, or links with European countries, we practically did not make use of the EU’s experience. In the last three years tremendous progress has been made. Now we should unite all the achievements into a single system and later include it into the EU system,” the head of the State Border Guard Service’s press center Serhii Astakhov explained.
These achievements were presented to the general public during the recent unveiling in a building of the State Border Guard Service of the document “Proposals on the Introduction of the Risk Control System and Criminal Analysis System into Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service.” Visitors were shown a jeep containing everything necessary for crime detection: various tools, scissors, a brush, colored pencils, a soapbox, and a small manual published under the editorship of the late general, Yurii Kravchenko. All this is packed in a small suitcase next to a notebook, a dactyloscopic scanner, satellite communication, and other equipment. From this car you can get in touch with the State Border Guard Service’s database and obtain all necessary information as well as access to processing documents.
There are plans for an all-European database, but even now Ukrainian border guards can contact their colleagues in other countries and request data about a suspicious person, car, or document.
Border guards are trained to be suspicious. Some employees of Ukraine’s Border Guard Service recounted an interesting story of how one border guard noticed a scratch on the door of a brand-new car. The car was detained, the doors were opened, and for the next two and a half hours they hauled out money to the tune of $3.5 million. “It is very important to have good intuition,” says the deputy director of the Training Directorate of the Personnel Department, Volodymyr Kozlovsky, “and sometimes to be a good psychologist. Every month we detain two or three citizens who are trying to smuggle children illegally across the border. We see everything: a father removing a child from its mother’s care, or people smuggling somebody else’s children. We can only guess the reasons. To understand is the militia’s business, ours is to detain. So, when we talk to a child we have to understand whether the child is being transported by force.
“The EU approach is like this: if everything is tracked down and analyzed on a country’s border, there’s no need to carry out such assiduous work inside the country. This is a general idea that has not been completely implemented even in the European Union,” Astakhov says. “Poland has attained standards that are acceptable to the EU, and now we are trying to model ourselves on Poland.”
Polish border guards are the co-organizers of the new systems’ implementation on the Ukrainian border, as well as the US embassy and the International Migration Organization. The exact cost of the project has not been publicized, but the border guards have promised to keep within the sum allotted by the state budget.
