REUTERS
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 Russian President Vladimir Putin, a correspondent of The Financial Times in Moscow Courtney Weaver wrote in her article "Russia incinerates contraband food," which was published on Thursday.
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, the FT wrote.
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.
The campaign has prompted questions about willfully 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.
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.
"The presidential decree is to take effect, and it must be enforced," Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters, saying it was not clear whether all 270,000 signatories were real Russians.
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."