Valentina Mikhailovna lives on Zheleznodorozhnaya Street in the village of Uspenskaya, on the border between the Rostov and Donetsk regions. While Ukraine and Russia were fraternal republics of the united and indivisible Soviet Union, Uspenka was equally united. Now it has turned into two adjacent foreign settlements, with the border running, so to speak, through the living. The Dobronogov family had the worst luck: their homestead was cut in half by the former administrative border between the Rostov and Donetsk regions. However, the Dobronogovs' neighbors in the Ukrainian corner of Uspenka can hardly be called lucky either. Ukraine got a tiny part of the settlement, only 14 households, while the main part of Uspenka remained in Russia. The store organized specifically for the Ukrainian residents of the settlement is a planned loss-maker: what kind of commerce can there be if the circle of customers is limited to just fourteen households? So the little store plods along: for example, bread is delivered here only once a week.
So the residents of Ukrainian Uspenka have to go to their more prosperous Russian fellow villagers for bread. But Valentina Mikhailovna, for example, cannot send her grandson for bread. To cross from Ukraine to Russia, a passport is required. Moreover, the child must be accompanied by an adult. If it is not a parent but a grandfather or grandmother, then at the border, in addition to the grandson's birth certificate, they will most likely require a notarized permission from the child's mom and dad to visit a foreign state. True, sometimes instead of a notarized document, which costs a bit of money, the Russian and Ukrainian border guards, liberal towards Soviet compatriots, still accept papers with seals from housing maintenance offices, homeowners' associations, or the enterprises where the parents work.
Valentina Mikhailovna's adult daughter lives separately from her parents, in the Russian part of Uspenka, and has to visit her elderly parents across the border, with all the ensuing procedures and inconveniences.
Border Underground
"There are several populated places like Uspenka on the Russian-Ukrainian border," says the head of the Rostov Customs, Major General Yuri Mikheyev. "For example, the village of Chertkovo is divided in half by the border. On one side of the railway track is Russia, on the other is Ukraine. The even side of the street is in one state, the odd side in the other."
It is even worse when the border cuts enterprises and collective farms in half, which now live under an amazing legal regime. Directors of some farms are forced to constantly cross the border while driving around their fields. My Ukrainian colleagues and I look calmly at such "violators." After all, in the Soviet Union, no one marked the administrative border between the Rostov, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions, and now it is 660 km of land and 150 miles of maritime state border. And this border
sometimes so whimsically crosses our common communications that it is impossible to provide full-fledged customs and border control on all its sections. There is even a section of the railway line that runs mostly through Russia, which
stretches along the border and only in one place covers 10 km of Ukrainian territory. Ideally, we and the Ukrainians should equip this ten-kilometer section of the railway line with checkpoints on both sides. However, this is expensive and, by and large, meaningless, since trains pass there without stopping.
The situation with the Donbas mines is even more complicated, as the subsurface of the border areas of the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Rostov regions is riddled with them. Moreover, the Luhansk mines and slag heaps are within direct line of sight of the Rostov ones. And underground there are tens of kilometers of mine workings. Sometimes miners, going down to the coalface, spend two hours on special electric trains to reach their workplace through extremely long underground corridors that keep turning onto the territory of the neighboring state. There is nothing surprising about this, because the mines were created back in the Soviet era. However, according to Major General of the Customs Service Yuri Mikheyev, it is unrealistic to establish a border at depth. Mr. Mikheyev hopes that soon we will have a common economic space with Ukraine, and the Russian customs will work on the Ukrainian border in the same mode as on the Belarusian border, where citizens of Belarus and Ukraine are relieved of many customs procedures.
Bottleneck
If you fly around the Russian-Ukrainian border by helicopter, you can see that it is becoming more substantial every year. The procedure for traveling from Russia to Ukraine and back is becoming more and more like traveling to a distant foreign country. It has not come to visas yet, but recently citizens of both states have to fill out migration cards at the border. Gradually, full-fledged checkpoints are growing along the border, not inferior to those that Russia has on the border with Finland or China. Just this year, three new Russian checkpoints will be commissioned on the borders with Ukraine: "Novoshakhtinsky", "Gukovsky", and "Kuibyshevo-2". The construction sites are so large that uninformed people might think that small factories are being built in the steppe. Each new checkpoint costs the federal budget about 6-9 million rubles.
However, as the head of the Southern Customs Administration, Lieutenant General Sergei Kurdyumov, says, the new checkpoints should make crossing the border as easy as possible for citizens and participants in foreign economic activity of both states. This, in his opinion, will help "overcome the irritation experienced by people who clearly remember how, just 11 years ago, they freely traveled from the Donetsk or Luhansk region to the Rostov region without any checkpoints, along any of the roads connecting Russia with Ukraine."
Indeed, new checkpoints are being equipped with the latest technology and will have separate traffic lanes for buses, trucks, and cars. However, it is unlikely that after they are put into operation, traffic jams will disappear at the Russian-Ukrainian border, where one sometimes has to stand for an hour and a half. For example, in the pre-border period, one could get from the Ukrainian city of Komsomolskoye to Rostov-on-Don in 2 hours 10 minutes. Now, on holidays or weekends, when the border traffic flow increases many times over, one has to lose two hours just at the customs post near Uspenka.
The point is that Russia and Ukraine are developing their checkpoints at different rates. For instance, opposite the under-construction super-modern Russian checkpoint "Kuibyshevo-2", Ukrainian customs officers and border guards have outdated trailers that are by definition unable to handle a large traffic flow. The result is a bottleneck effect.
Alexander Shevtsov, head of the infrastructure development department of the Southern Customs Administration, states: "On the Russian side, powerful transit flows of goods can be passed without delay, while queues form on the Ukrainian side. Moreover, Kuibyshevo-2 is far from the only such example. The same can be observed in Nekhoteyevka, Belgorod Oblast, where the Russian checkpoint has 22 traffic lanes, while the Ukrainian one still has only two."
The Ukrainians are slowing the development of their checkpoint opposite Kuibyshevo-2 because it is located on the Rostov-Kharkov highway, which does not actually exist yet. The route is strategic and could become the shortest land route connecting Western Europe and Ukraine with southern Russia. However, the road was designed back in Soviet times, and now most of it must be completed by the Ukrainian side. No one is even willing to predict when this construction will be finished. So it may turn out that the super-modern Kuibyshevo-2, being put into operation in December, will have no one to process for a long time.
Private customs
In general, history, as we know, repeats itself. And new pages in the chronicle of southern Russian customs sometimes bear a striking resemblance to events of two or three centuries ago.
In the 18th century, Cossacks stood on bypass roads around Starocherkassk and collected tolls from merchants trying to save on customs payments. 250 years later, descendants of those same Cossacks in the Novoshakhtinsk area did the same. When on October 1, 1992, Rostov customs officers first took up positions on the Russian-Ukrainian border, most cars began crossing the border, bypassing the lonely state customs posts. The local population immediately got their bearings. Two unemployed miners installed a makeshift barrier on one of these bypass roads, dressed in camouflage, and began collecting tolls. From some they took money, from others a bottle and a snack. The people paid without complaint. The private customs operation lasted almost a day and might have continued working if not for envious fellow villagers who reported it to the authorities.
The customs officers, previously unseen at the Russian-Ukrainian border, initially in October 1992 could not convince the population that Ukraine and Russia were now sovereign states with all the procedures that entailed. At first, car drivers drove past customs officers without even slowing down. Only when police were sent to reinforce the border did customs control gradually begin to improve. Later, however, the police were very reluctant to leave the border posts. There is a story about a police major who tried to persuade a high-ranking customs official from Moscow to leave his unit at the customs post, in return promising to equip the post with a canopy and asphalt the surrounding area. How can one not recall the tax-farmed customs houses that existed on the Don in the 18th century, maintained by private individuals. A private person paid the state something like an imputed income tax and calmly ran the customs house. In any case, the police were eventually removed from the border.
Crossing the Russian-Ukrainian border is completely free. However, often drivers, in order to cross the invisible line separating Ukraine and Russia, unknowingly pay for some insurance, environmental control, or simply an environmental fee. Near Uspenka, on the Ukrainian side, right next to the customs post, there is a small trailer where an insurance agent from a Kyiv insurance company sells Russians a compulsory motor liability insurance policy. The sales technique is roughly as follows: a Ukrainian customs officer nods toward the trailer and asks them to complete the document for temporary import of the vehicle there. The driver approaches the trailer, where he is warned that without the policy the car will not be allowed into Ukraine, and besides, Ukrainian traffic police will fine the uninsured Russian at every step, so it is easier to pay 180 rubles and not deny yourself anything. One can, of course, not pay for the insurance. It is wiser to immediately go and sort things out with the customs officer who pointed to the trailer. But he, smiling, will say that you simply misunderstood him, and in fact you need to go to another trailer—the environmental service. There a person stamps your document and, without looking up, says: "30 rubles." Naturally, you do not need to pay that either; just ask for a cash receipt and all questions disappear by themselves. However, all these disputes take about 10-20 minutes. Moreover, most people do not know their rights, and, according to observations of a correspondent for the newspaper "Vremya Novostei", approximately three out of four drivers buy the insurance.
It cannot be said that there is nothing similar on the Russian side. In Rostov Oblast, the Military Insurance Company is on duty on the Russian side. And it is unlikely that insurers would be able to sell so many policies outside the checkpoint. People often buy policies, believing that this is a mandatory document without which crossing the border is impossible.
Two and a half thousand kilometers of the Russian border with Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, under the purview of the Southern Customs Administration, are today the most undeveloped and troubled. However, from a security point of view, the Russian-Ukrainian section does not cause great concern, despite the fact that between the customs and border control posts there are on average 100 km of border not covered by any engineering structures.
“A fully equipped border like the one with Finland, Russia will never have with Ukraine,” believes Major General Mikheev. “There is no need for that. The Russian-Ukrainian border cannot be called criminal in comparison with other sections. Every year the flow of contraband goods on this section of the Russian border decreases. People are getting used to traveling through checkpoints and processing their goods in a civilized manner. Over the past ten years, everyone has realized that Russia and Ukraine, although close, are still different states.”
Ukrainian and Russian smugglers are mainly engaged in fuels and lubricants, coal, and auto parts. Several years ago, every night caravans of fuel tankers followed from Russia toward Ukraine directly across the fields, with surveillance vehicles and reconnaissance deployed ahead. Back then, fuel was especially scarce in Ukraine, and contraband fuel enriched many residents of the border zone. For example, in the not-so-wealthy settlement of Matveyev Kurgan in the Rostov region, located just a few kilometers from Ukraine, many two-story houses made of Italian brick have grown up over several years, although there are no large enterprises here, and Matveyev Kurgan on the Don was never famous for great economic successes.
“It is possible to effectively fight smugglers on the Russian-Ukrainian border, where the steppe landscape and more than a thousand roads, only by interacting with Ukrainian colleagues,” believes the deputy head for force support of the Southern Customs Administration, Major General Viktor Koptenko. “We have an unspoken agreement with Ukrainian customs officers, according to which we alternately patrol certain sections of the border. They make noise in one area, we mark our presence in another, then we switch places. If our SOBR appears somewhere, contraband life in that area freezes for a long time. Similarly, we patrol 700 km of the Russian-Kazakh border. Not long ago, our helicopter pursued a smuggler’s car, after which SOBR landed on them from above. There was talk among locals for about two months, and for about the same time they refrained from any smuggling forays, fearing a helicopter customs landing.”
Although customs officers say that there are no engineering structures on the Russian-Ukrainian border, nevertheless, some roads that bypass checkpoints are still dug up. As it turns out, this is done by local farmers, whose crops are ruined by smuggled fuel tankers. They also became the main operational assistants of customs officers, for which, however, they periodically receive threats from people engaged in large-scale smuggling, for which suspended sentences are now given.