One year into its embargo on western food products, Russia has launched a controversial campaign to destroy all contraband meat, dairy and produce, using on-the-spot incinerators, dump trucks, rollers and meat grinders.
On Thursday, three federal agencies began confiscating and burning hundreds of tonnes of illicit cheese, fruit and other goods, acting on a decree signed by Vladimir Putin. Incinerators to destroy the food have been placed at Russian border points stretching from Kaliningrad in the west to St Petersburg in the north and Altai in the east.
By mid-afternoon on Thursday, Russia’s agricultural watchdog announced that it had already destroyed 55 tonnes of peaches, nectarines and tomatoes in Smolensk; 20 tonnes of cheese in Orenburg; and nine tonnes of cheese in Belgorod.
In Moscow, the agency said it seized 28 tonnes of meat products from Canada, the Netherlands and Germany and 28 tonnes of Polish apples and tomatoes.
“This work will be performed every day. This is not a one stage campaign — this is serious work,” Alexei Alekseenko, a deputy for the agricultural watchdog, told a Russian radio outlet.
Svetlana Zaporozhchenko, a spokesperson for the watchdog, described how the nine tonnes of embargoed cheese, found with no identifying labels, had been destroyed by roller in a special test area next to the border with Ukraine. “The destruction has been completed,” she told Russian newswire Interfax. “The destroyed products will be buried.”
While the crackdown was once jokingly billed as a war against prosciutto and Parmesan, it has taken on more sinister undertones with the new destruction campaign.
A Duma deputy from Russia’s pro-Kremlin party has proposed a new bill that would make importing sanctioned food products into Russia a criminal offence, carrying a prison sentence of up to 12 years, while a vigilante youth group has begun conducting raids on Russian supermarkets searching for banned European and US products.
The campaign has also prompted questions about wilfully destroying food in a country where more than a tenth of the population lives below the poverty line and many endured the famine of the second world war and food shortages during the Soviet era.
“I don’t understand how a country that lived through horrible famine during the war and the post-revolution years can destroy food products,” Vladimir Soloviev, a staunchly pro-Kremlin TV host, wrote on Twitter.
More than 270,000 have signed an online petition on the website change.org asking for the food not to be destroyed but to be distributed instead to pensioners, veterans and the disabled.
Under Mr Putin’s new decree, Russian authorities now have the right to destroy any sanctioned food that has made its way into restaurants or grocery stores, closing an earlier loophole in the embargo that made it illegal to transport sanctioned food products into Russia but not to sell them once they had arrived.
“The presidential decree is to take effect, and it must be enforced,” Mr Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters, saying it was not clear whether all 270,000 signatories were real Russians.
Russia banned most EU and US produce, meat and dairy last August in retaliation against western sanctions. Meant as a two-pronged move to both punish the west and boost Russia’s own battered agricultural industry, the embargo has had a mixed effect.
Some local food producers have benefited from the trade ban but consumers have faced soaring prices on basic food items because of the artificial lack of supply. Meanwhile, sanctioned food products continue to seep into the country — often through Belarus, which has an open trade border with Russia.
On a recent evening at a new Greek restaurant in Moscow, for example, a waiter produced two salads topped by generous and glistening portions of fried halloumi. The cheese, he announced, was from Greece. But when asked to detail how it had made it past Russian customs restrictions, he demurred. “My job is just to bring it to the table.”
Andrei Nesterov, manager for the restaurant, which is owned by the Kremlin-friendly restaurateur Arkady Novikov, quickly claimed in a later interview the server had misspoken. “We tell our guests that it’s Greek but that’s not entirely accurate — it’s from the Moscow suburbs,” he insisted.
Alexei Zimin, co-owner of the Moscow restaurant Dom 12, said some restaurant owners had been finding ways to get around the ban, but may be less likely to do so with the newer measures.
“It’s like smoking marijuana,” he said. “You can find some, but it takes so much effort to get it, you’re better off just having wine instead.”
