Three smugglers attacked a border guard near the village Velykyi Bychkiv, Zakarpattya Oblast, some 700 kilometers west of Kyiv on Aug.7 and shot him in a back with a rubber bullet gun, the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine said in a report published on Aug. 8.
On Aug. 7, an officer of a Mukachivskiy squad of the State Border Guard Service noticed a drone flying from Romania to Ukraine and decided to track it to its final destination.
When the drone landed in a yard of a private house located in the outskirts Velykyi Bychkiv, which is situated right on the banks of the Tisa River, which forms the Ukrainian-Romania border in the area. When the officer approached the house, three locals suddenly attacked him. One of the attackers shot the border guard in the back with a rubber bullet gun.
Border guards called the police and all three attackers were arrested. The guard was hospitalized, but was not seriously injured, local media reported, citing sources in the State Border Guard Service.
“More and more smugglers have started using flying drones to transport contraband cigarettes across the borderline to the countries of European Union,” the service’s report said.
Smuggling has always been a major problem in Ukraine. In 2017 Ukraine became the leading source of smuggled cigarettes in European Union, with more than 5 billion cigarettes estimated to have been smuggled across the Ukrainian border that year.
While smugglers have attacked some border guards, they also frequently cooperate with others, sharing the profits from the illegal trade.
Ukraine has been losing more than Hr 105 billion ($3.8 billion) a year because of smuggling schemes,” Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov wrote on Facebook on June 25.
That is more than the 2018 Defense Ministry budget (Hr 82 billion) or the Interior Ministry budget (Hr 60 billion), Avakov said.
German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung on Aug.6 published an investigation into the most popular corruption schemes at Ukrainian customs, which are estimated to cost $4.8 billion a year in losses to the Ukrainian budget.
