Ramping up enforcement of a ban on European food imports, the Russian authorities on Thursday destroyed hundreds of tons of foodstuffs they said violated the proscription, instituted a year ago in retaliation for Western sanctions over Ukraine.
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Russia’s food safety agency confirmed it has destroyed about 180 tons of fruit including nectarine, peaches, grapes and cherries that crossed the border from Belarus and “falsely” marked as arriving from Turkey.
Many Russians say the government has lost sight of the everyday struggles faced by ordinary citizens.
Putin signed a decree ordering all confiscated western food “be destroyed in front of witnesses, and the act should be captured on video, to preclude corruption”.
But the decision to destroy the food has prompted a rare outburst of public ire as the economic crisis roiling the country has pushed millions of Russians into poverty and made it harder for them to afford basic foods. “Some real triumph of humanism”, Kasyanov said on Twitter.
Fears of western technology sending information to intelligence services is encouraging Russian Federation to consider banning hi-tech imports, but concerns include WTO fines – and ability to source local alternatives. “This can be a show of barbarity, a problem to society, a refusal to see the moral aspect, the place it’s most necessary”, Vedomosti enterprise every day wrote in a front-page editorial.
On Thursday morning, more than 258,000 Russians had signed an online petition on website Change.org calling for the foods to be given away to the needy. Agriculture minister Alexander Tkachev declined to comment on Wednesday.
The new government order is for food to be destroyed “by any means that do not harm the environment”, nearly an open invitation for the corrupt to fake food bonfires and divert goodies onto the black market.
One of the first batches of food to be eliminated was 10 tonnes of cheese in Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine.
The primary meals destruction got here as Russia’s ruble hit 70 to the euro for the primary time since March and 64.four towards the greenback for the primary time since February.
President Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, already embroiled in a scandal about the expensive watch he wore at his recent wedding, struck a note of “let them eat cake” indifference when he questioned whether the signatures on the petition had been verified. It said some German dairy products and Italian meat were burned in an airport incinerator.
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Prominent pro-Kremlin TV anchor Vladimir Solovyov said: “I don’t understand how food can be destroyed in a country that lived through the frightful hunger during the war and tough years that followed”.
