Special mobile groups comprised of law-enforcement agents and employees of the Fiscal Service of Ukraine to counteract smuggling across the line of contact in Donbas will be created, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said.
"The groups made up of representatives of the Fiscal Service, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), [will be] the mobile teams that will fight smuggling in the east [of Ukraine], and will have to be reliably protected by the military and will be accompanied by Ukrainian paratroopers," he said at a meeting with local government and security officials in Odesa on Wednesday, adding that such groups will work in the buffer zone along the contact line.
Poroshenko said that smuggling is carried out by dishonest Armed Forces of Ukraine personnel and pro-Russian occupation forces.
However, lawyers and high-ranking officials repeatedly said that the notion of "smuggling" applies to international economic relations and does not apply to violations within Ukrainian territory along the demarcation line with the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics.
