Ukraine Imposes a Stricter Entry Regime on Belarusians :: Charter'97 :: News

Ukrainian customs officers put a stamp “entry-departure” into the passports of the Belarusian travelers at the cross-border point. The data about the individual and his passport information is inserted into a special paragraph. Gomel residents claim that after such registration Belarusians may cross the border daily. However, in three months time the Ukrainian frontier troops will launch a repeated registration.

We have an open border with Russia, so the Ukrainians may well get to Belarus via a third country. The one thing that the Belarusian customs demands from Ukrainian visitors is the availability of their IDs. Without the proper documents the train passengers and other traveling folks are returned to where they belong.

The order at the border, say Gomel customs officers, can be improved not by the introduction of stamps, but rather by the opening of simplified cross-border points. The sides already signed a deal to set up 14 such customs offices in the Gomel region. At this point only two of them are indeed operational – in Alexandrovka and Novaya Iolcha villages. The Belarusian side prepared another three border crossings – in Dobrush, Gomel and Lelchitsy districts, although the Ukrainians haven’t yet equipped their own.

Loev’s inhabitants have plenty of complaints about the Ukrainian customs. The villagers are separated from the Ukrainian territory, where many of their close relatives dwell, by a 300 meter wide Dniepr river. But in order to cross over to Ukraine, they got to travel for a hundred kilometers to Gomel. Such weird conditions force even the law-abiding citizens to look for alternative ways of how to infiltrate the neighboring country.