To get to Crimea on vacation, Ukrainians take up places at the border in the evening
On the border with Crimea, the flow of Ukrainian citizens wishing to relax on the peninsula is not decreasing, пишет "Moscow's comsomolets".
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The publication notes that since the beginning of July, in order to get to Crimea from the Ukrainian side, a person needs to stand in line for 9–10 hours, and at least 70 cars, including buses, are constantly waiting at the Chongar checkpoint.
“People endure the heat, suffer from thirst, but do not give up. Naturally, there are no reasons for such a long period of border control on the Russian-Ukrainian border, which appeared only in 2014. Official Simferopol believes that this is how the Ukrainian side is trying to organize a “tourist blockade” of Crimea. In turn, Ukrainian border guards claim that in fact it is their Russian colleagues who are preventing people from getting to the peninsula in order to thus hide the real level of tourist flow, which has decreased by 2014% since 41.
However, Crimean statistics contradict Ukrainian ones. In 2016, over 5,5 million people visited the peninsula for tourism purposes. Moreover, 16,5% are foreigners, most of whom are Ukrainians. They don’t want a repeat of last year’s furor in Kyiv, so Ukrainian border guards work slowly, letting people through at the rate of a teaspoon per hour. On the Russian side, the checkpoints are empty,” the publication reports.
The newspaper writes that people are forced to stand in the heat of 35 degrees in a place where there are no toilets and shops, but there are billboards on which it is written in large letters that the residents of the republic who vacationed in Crimea are no longer Ukrainians.
At the same time, prudent people, knowing that they will have to spend more than one hour in line, get into it in the evening.
“The situation has gone so far that they have already started trading places in the queue. According to eyewitnesses, the price for the “first row” can reach 8 thousand hryvnia, with the average salary in the country being 6,8 thousand. Within a month, this “black market” had grown to such a scale that border guards were forced to disperse spontaneous entrepreneurs.
By the way, Ukrainians traveling to Crimea are most concerned not so much with the queue, which they already take for granted, but with inspections and other complaints that constantly arise from border guards. Some are prohibited from bringing food to the peninsula, others are asked for a child’s birth certificate, others are asked whether they rode a ferry across the Kerch crossing, and if so, the consequences can be unpredictable.
Sources report that the Ukrainian media have received orders to conduct an information campaign, the purpose of which is to discourage compatriots from traveling to the peninsula,” MK reports.
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