Leonid Bershidsky writes: Russian President Vladimir Putin has mounted a new campaign in his propaganda war with the West: The highly publicized destruction of imported food, which the government banned last year in retaliation for Western economic sanctions. This time around, though, his constituents aren’t quite with him.
The ban, aimed at the U.S. and European countries that imposed sanctions on Russia over its aggression in Ukraine, covers a long of items, including fruit, vegetables, most kinds of meat, fish and dairy products.
The local replacements often aren’t all that great. In a taste test of one of the bizarre cheeses that have filled Russian store shelves since the embargo, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker concluded that “the disintegrating texture is unnerving, and feels as if hundreds of tiny globules of parmesan have been left out on the pavement for a couple of weeks and then stuck back together with glue.”
To satisfy demand for the real thing, embargoed goods have been filtering into Russia. Some arrive by circuitous routes to establish acceptable provenance, or are repackaged in neighboring Belarus to pretend they originated there (I’ve seen Belorussian salmon in stores, though the landlocked country doesn’t produce it). Others are simply smuggled in: Russian customs inspectors are not known for their incorruptibility.
In a rare act of defiance, the Magnit chain of discount supermarkets, one of the country’s biggest retailers, sued the government agency charged with keeping embargoed items out of stores, claiming Putin’s decree on the food sanctions bans only their import, not their sale.
Putin, however, won’t have it. He wants his food embargo to work as effectively as before, boosting local producers and punishing Western companies that have already seen their Russian business shrink.
The Russian Orthodox Church doesn’t look kindly upon the destruction of food, either. More than 280,000 people — an unusually large number for Russia — have signed a Change.org petition asking the Kremlin to repeal the food destruction decree and hand over any confiscated food to the needy. “If something can simply be eaten, why destroy it?” the petition says.
Putin’s government, however, is like a tank without a reverse gear.
Russians have seen a lot of strange things on state TV under Putin, but never before have they been treated to a public cheese execution. I expect the campaign will be as ineffectual as it is grotesque. Installing incinerators at customs and crushing wheels of Gouda is not going to make customs officials any less willing to turn a blind eye for the right reward.
