New professional Russian border guarding
From January this year, the Russian Border Guard Service uses no conscripts along the 17,000 km long Russian border. That enhances the quality of border protection. However, there is still a long way to go before border-crossing procedures for traders and ordinary people is smooth and efficient, deputy head of the FSB’s Border Service in Northwest Russia admits.
Mr. Rafael Derbayev says to weekly journal Expert that his service now efficiently stops trespassers on the border in Northwest Russia. In 2008, the border guards revealed and stopped 1100 people trying to illegally get in or out of the country, most of them along the Russian-Finnish border. In addition, 150 kg of illegal drugs were confiscated and smuggling worth 67 million RUB stopped, he says. From this year of, the border guard service is fully professionalized. And new modern equipment is provided to the service. However, other problems are abundant on the border. Among them is a mentality problem, Expert.ru argues. Parts of the service has still has not fully grasped the new situation on the border with steady flows of people, goods and traders in and out of the country. And the professionalization of the border service might not quickly solve this problem. In addition, the different federal authorities represented at the border stations have failed to coordinate operations, resulting in unnecessary red tape for the travelers and for cross-border business. –The optimization of these structures’ work includes a major untapped reserve for increased transport capacity, a leader of the Agency of Sea and River Transport said to the journal. Despite several government attempts to impose new measures on the border, the bureaucratic structures on the border remain more or less unchanged. Thus, the government already three years ago decided that all operations at the border points were to be conducted by the Border Guard Service and the Customs alone and that the travelers should be handled in one-window-system. Today, five different services still operate the border stations. “The level of interaction of the controlling organs […] demonstrates a complete inability of the authorities to deal with the different bureaucratic structures”, Expert.ru writes.
