Ukraine is surrounded by seven countries and is the largest nation on the European continent. With almost 7,000 kilometers of borders in need of protection, there is no shortage of challenges.
Its frontiers stretch for 5,638 kilometers on land and 1,355 kilometers along the Azov and Black sea coastlines. Last year, 100.6 million people crossed Ukrainian borders through 229 different checkpoints, according to Andriy Demchenko, spokesperson at the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, or SBGS.
And the largest European country faces plenty of threats at its borders too.
In the east and south, Russia’s war against Ukraine — which has claimed more than 13,000 lives — remains a looming threat to the nation’s territorial integrity and national security. On the western borders with European Union countries, smuggling and dilapidated infrastructure poses the biggest challenge.
Eastern borders and Crimea
Ukraine is one of a few countries that have had its internationally recognized borders changed by force since the Second World War, and it is no coincidence that it also shares its longest border, of nearly 2,300 kilometers, with Russia, its only eastern neighbor.
Over the past five years of conflict, Ukraine lost control of 409 kilometers of border in the east of the country, along with 35 kilometers along the Azov Sea coast and 54,000 square kilometers of the maritime economic zone around Crimea, according to Demchenko.
On the official border with Russia in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, land crossings were shut down by the Cabinet of Ministers in 2015. Instead, Ukraine opened five temporary checkpoints along the 500 kilometer line of contact with the occupied areas. Another checkpoint sits in the frontline town of Zolote in Luhansk Oblast, but it is not in use because of the militant occupants’ lack of cooperation.
Crossing this line of contact can be deadly: “Step left, step right and you can step on a mine or take a bullet from a sniper hiding nearby,” Oleh Slobodyan, a former spokesperson at the SBGS, said of the Stanytsia Luhanska checkpoint.
About 1.2 million people cross checkpoints along the occupied territory per month, according to Maria Alekseyenko, project manager at Right to Protection, a United Nations High Commission for Refugees-supported Ukrainian group that helps internally displaced persons in Ukraine.
Around 80 percent of them are the elderly, coming to the Ukrainian side to get their pensions or buy goods which are in short supply in occupied areas.
The infrastructure at checkpoints, which is supervised by military-civil administrations, only started to improve in 2017. In Donetsk Oblast, local authorities allocated Hr 11 million, or $440,000, to renovate four checkpoints.
“If there had previously been only a few wooden toilets, small canopies and a bad road, especially in Mayorske, it became much better after the reconstruction,” said Alekseyenko.
Checkpoints were also equipped with medical stations. But in the first half of this year, 34 elderly people still died while crossing, mainly from heart attacks.
“It can be said that they are victims of the war,” said Alekseyenko.
In Luhansk there is only one checkpoint that 10,000 people use each day, most of whom are pensioners. Instead of receiving their pensions as normal, they have to prove their IDP status every 60 days to continue receiving money, according to Olena Grekova, head of the Severodonetsk-based office of Right to Protection. Those who cannot make it to the validation point receive nothing.
The impaired movement of goods is another painful question for locals. Since 2015, Ukraine has prohibited a variety of goods from crossing the contact line. For example, unlike fruits and vegetables, berries are not approved. In addition, the total weight of transported goods cannot exceed 75 kilograms.
“It’s absurd! Once, my colleague bought a toy for her kid, who was with the grandmother in Luhansk, and she couldn’t bring it across, since it’s not on the list of allowed goods,” said Grekova.
Taking advantage of the situation, some locals started making brisk business, charging elderly and infirm people for wheelchair transport across checkpoints. The price for a one-way trip starts at Hr 50 and could climb as high as Hr 300 to go across a bridge that had been destroyed by militants.
Another challenge comes in the form of electronic passes required by the Security Service of Ukraine, which must be obtained 10 days before crossing the checkpoint.
“Very often people from the occupied territory ask tricksters to fill out the data online for money since they might not have access to Internet, or they don’t know how to do it,” said Grekova.
The price for such a service on occupied territory can reach Hr 900, or $36.
As for Crimea, Russia has been trying to pass the peninsula off as a tourist destination while forging the peninsula into a powerful military base, according to Slobodyan.
In the first eight months of 2019, 1.36 million people crossed the checkpoints in Crimea, 20,000 fewer than the same period last year. However, the occupants are trying to create the appearance of massive tourist flows, according to Demchenko.
“To achieve this, they deliberately slow down movement, starting to check cars more carefully,” he said. “They create huge lines, and the media on their side shows this picture.”
When Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2015 Ukraine had to open three temporary checkpoints on the Crimean isthmus — Kalanchak, Chaplynka and Chongar.
However, unlike checkpoints in the Donbas, which are supervised by military-civil administrations, the Ministry of Infrastructure is in charge of all the border infrastructure along Crimea.
No funds from the Ukrainian budget were allocated to make checkpoints more comfortable until 2018, when the ministry was able to put Hr 99 million ($3.9 million) into the checkpoint infrastructure, according to Iurii Lavreniuk, Deputy Minister of Infrastructure of Ukraine. This is still not enough, since the checkpoints in Kalanchak and Chongar alone cost Hr 170 million ($6.8 million).
Lavreniuk said that President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered the completion of regime zones at checkpoints, including buildings for state border guards, SBU and customs officers and passport control zones by Nov. 15.
Roads are also planned to be widened from two lanes to at least six and official bus stops will be installed — currently all passenger transport is illegal.
“But there are still not going to be monumental buildings since we, of course, don’t recognize the occupation of Crimea,” said Lavreniuk.
Western borders
Ukraine’s busiest passenger traffic flows across borders with European Union countries, mainly with Poland, sharing nearly 550 kilometers of border with Ukraine. In 2018, 21.7 million people crossed these borders, according to the SBGS.
Long lines and slow passport control are big problems for Ukrainians and foreigners in western Ukraine, according to last year’s study by the NGO Europe Without Borders. People can spend from five to eight hours or more while crossing the border with Poland.
“When people were asked what was the longest time they spent while crossing the border, the answer was a day, two and even three days,” said Pavlo Kravchuk, communications manager at Europe Without Barriers.
The lines worsened significantly when Ukraine’s visa free regime with most European countries came into effect in June 2017.
Insufficient infrastructure is another problem along the western borders. Very often, there is no place to dispose of garbage. In addition, people complain about a lack of toilets. Roads to the Western border are in poor condition. Crossing the Hrushiv-Budomezh joint border checkpoint is much faster than some of the others but many drivers avoid it because the road on Ukraine’s side is in a terrible state.
Those delivering goods to the EU via the borders with Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, still complain about difficulties in crossing. Lengthy inspection times on both sides, as well as EU quotas on the amount of trucks allowed to cross each day, can result in bedlam at the border.
“People prefer to drive to a busier checkpoint and stay in line for a longer time to save their car,” said Kravchuk.
On the border with Poland there are four joint border crossing checkpoints. All are on the Polish side. Putting similar checkpoints on the Ukrainian side could help develop infrastructure around them, including hotels and shops. But Schengen legislation prevents this from happening.
At the border with Moldova, the situation is different: The Kuchurhan – Pervomaisk joint border crossing has been located on Ukrainian territory since 2017. It became the best option for Moldovan border guards to control flows of people and goods into Transnistria, Russia’s unrecognized satellite state sandwiched between the countries.
Opening a joint border crossing checkpoint became an effective tool to combat smuggling, which used to flourish there, according to Slobodyan. Cigarettes and alcohol were at the top of the list. The difference in the price of alcohol was 2.5–5 euros per liter, for cigarettes — five times per pack: “There were so many cigarettes that border guards estimated that if every resident of Moldova, including babies, would smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, there would be enough cigarettes for 1,000 years,” said Slobodyan.
Now, border guards observe only isolated cases of much smaller scale smuggling.
Smuggling still major challenge
Smuggling is a big problem. The Ukraine Economic Outlook analytical group projects that $13.5 billion in goods that violate customs regulations will flow into Ukraine in 2019 and that value is rising each year. Billions of dollars in goods and resources are flowing out of Ukraine as well.
Ukraine’s criminal law has a narrow definition of smuggling restricted to weapons, explosives, dangerous materials and some cultural items. The lion’s share of smuggling falls under customs violations, penalized by fines.
Experts said outbound “customs violations” include alcohol, chemicals, natural resources such as amber and especially cigarettes. Cigarette smuggling alone led to Hr 5 billion in taxes not reaching state coffers in 2019, according to Kantar.
Smugglers move all kinds of products into Ukraine via false declarations, by going around customs checkpoints or using a multitude of people carrying a limited amount of goods. Another scheme involves declaring that goods will pass through Ukraine but they will actually be sold here.
According to a Ukrainian Institute for the Future survey, 80 percent of respondents have smuggled goods and appliances in their homes. Many retail stores stock smuggled products on their shelves. This allows Ukrainians to buy goods cheaper but costs the state budget billions.
Amber mafias are an established presence in Ukraine, moving amber through airports to China and the Middle East and across the border to Poland. While not categorized as smuggling, a great deal of timber exports are tied to corrupt schemes including unlawful logging or leaving Ukraine as firewood and entering other countries as lumber, according to multiple investigations.
For many local economies along the border, smuggling accounts for up to half of people’s income and goods on store shelves, said Igar Tyshkevich, a policy expert with the Ukrainian Institute for the Future. Breaking them out of this cycle is a prerequisite for any effort to fight smuggling.
Iurii Lavreniuk, deputy minister of infrastructure of Ukraine, shows Kyiv Post on Sept.18 where the reconstruction of three checkpoints on the isthmus of the Crimean peninsula, occupied by Russia, will take place this year. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Northern borders
Ukraine shares 1,084 kilometers of its northern borders with Belarus. This border is a major tool in bilateral relations, but can also be fraught with difficulties.
Just recently, on Sept. 3 Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko during the International Conference on Countering Terrorism in Minsk said that he closed the border with Ukraine due to a significant increase in weapons flows.
According to Demchenko, Lukashenko’s statement was misleading and exaggerated. For the first eight months of 2019, only 38 weapons were detected on the Belarusian border — 20 units were coming to Ukraine, and only 18 to Belarus. Only one unit was classified as a firearm; the rest were non-firearms or dummy weapons: “Sometimes people just forget to take it out of their car, or try to hide it, as they think it’s their personal means of self-defense,” said Demchenko.
The Belarusian side didn’t inform Ukraine about the details of any weapon or ammunition seizures.
“This is a purely political statement that points to a further step towards integrating Belarus into a single legal field with the Russian Federation,” said Slobodyan.
Russia and Belarus have common databases. All Ukrainian citizens who show up in the Russian Federation’s databases at the border with Belarus are visible to Russian special services, Slobodyan says.
This is how Pavlo Hryb, a Ukrainian political prisoner was kidnapped by Russian security agents in Belarus and charged with terrorism in Russia. Hryb has since been released as part of a prisoner exchange with Russia.
“Our northern border is a zone of influence for Russia rather than the comfort zone we have at the border with our European colleagues,” Slobodyan said.
