Russia Destroys Piles of Banned Western Food

                           

Ramping up enforcement of a ban on European food imports, the Russian authorities on Thursday destroyed hundreds of tons of foodstuffs they said violated the proscription, instituted a year ago in retaliation for Western sanctions over Ukraine.

Following an order by President Vladimir V. Putin, officials threw huge piles of pork, tomatoes, peaches and cheese into landfills and garbage incinerators.

The frenzy, remarkable even by the standards of Russia’s recent politicization of food supplies, was gleefully reported by Russian state television.

“You can see behind me cheese that was made nobody knows where, without labels,” Yekaterina Mironova, a journalist on Rossiya 24 television, standing before a gigantic mound of orange cheese rounds, as a bulldozer revved its engine in the background.

The offending cheese, she said, would be plowed into a landfill in the Belgorod region of western Russia.

News reports chronicled the destruction throughout the day, along the entire breadth of Russia’s western border, from Orenburg in the south to St. Petersburg in the north.



After Western nations imposed sanctions on Russian banks and oil companies over Moscow’s support for separatism in eastern Ukraine, Russia turned, as it has so often before, to food, banning European and American imports.

But Russia’s notoriously corrupt customs inspections turned out to be as porous as, well, Swiss cheese. Many products, like Danish canned ham, easily found in Moscow grocery stores, were slipping through.

Importers had taken to obscuring the origins of shipments, suggesting that they came from Turkey rather than a European Union country, for example, or used other ruses to slip sustenance over the borders.

However, in a country where food prices have in some cases doubled and tripled with the collapse of the ruble and the import ban, more than 288,000 people endorsed an online petition at Change.org asking Mr. Putin to cancel his decree and stop wasting food. A spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said Mr. Putin would be informed of the petition.