Who will be affected by Ukraine's withdrawal from the agreement on cross-border cooperation?
Moscow - Kyiv, March 11 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - From March 16, Ukraine withdraws from the agreement with Russia on small border traffic. The situation will hit residents of some villages in the Grayvoronsky district of the Belgorod region and the Glushkovsky district of the Kursk region the hardest. “There are settlements there that are divided in half between Russia and Ukraine. People live in Russia, but go to the store in Ukraine,” says one of the municipalities. “It’s difficult to understand what they should do after the introduction of new rules; they won’t put up a checkpoint there in the middle of the street,” writes Kommersant.
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The canceled agreement was signed by the governments of Russia and Ukraine in 2011, and it came into force in March 2012. The document concerned residents of border areas of six Russian regions - Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kursk, Rostov regions and Krasnodar Territory. And six Ukrainian ones - Donetsk, Lugansk, Sumy, Kharkov and Chernigov regions, as well as the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. If there was a mark in the civil passport about registration in the border region, citizens of the two countries could cross the border without even filling out migration cards. A total of 146 such points were opened along the border.
From March 16, residents of six Russian and six Ukrainian regions will have to cross the state border on the usual basis: only at international checkpoints and only with a foreign passport.
Regional checkpoints, located at a distance of 7-10 km from each other, were more convenient for local residents than international ones, the distance between which could be 50 km or more. In Donetsk, Rostov region, there was an international checkpoint “Izvarino”, and a few kilometers away there were four more checkpoints for local residents. When there were fierce battles for control of Izvarino in July, refugees calmly crossed the border a few kilometers away at the Donetsk-Severny checkpoint.
After the annexation of Crimea to Russia, the agreement on border traffic de facto ceased to apply to the three checkpoints that existed there - the port of Kavkaz - the port of Crimea, the port of Yeisk - the port of Mariupol and the port of Novorossiysk - the port of Yalta. As a result, there were 39 international checkpoints left: 11 railway, 27 road and one ferry. Of these, 15 are located on the border of the Belgorod and Kharkov regions, 14 - on the border of the Kursk and Sumy regions. Six operational points remain in the Ukrainian-controlled north of the Luhansk region.
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