(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Russian officials yesterday steamrolled tonnes of cheese, fruit and vegetables, defying public outrage to begin a controversial drive to destroy Western food smuggled into the crisis-hit country.
President Vladimir Putin last week signed a decree ordering the trashing of all food - from gourmet cheeses to fruit and vegetables - that breaches a year-old embargo on Western imports imposed in retaliation for sanctions over the Ukraine crisis.
Russian television showed officials dumping truckloads of round bright orange cheeses on a patch of wasteland and then driving over them with a steamroller in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine.
The cheeses arrived from Ukraine in unmarked boxes, but were most likely produced in the European Union, a reporter at the scene said.
A spokeswoman for the food safety agency Rosselkhoznadzor said that the flattened cheese - amounting to almost nine tonnes - would be buried underground.
"From today, agricultural produce, raw products and foods, which come from a country that has decided to impose economic sanctions on Russian legal entities or individuals ... and which are banned from import into Russia, are due to be destroyed," the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement.
Moscow last year banned a slew of food products from the West, from delicacies to staples such as apples. Food brought in for private consumption is still permitted.
Russia complains that some importers are circumventing the ban by illegally slapping on new labels that claim the food was produced in neighbouring ex-Soviet countries.
The food safety agency has said it planned to destroy several hundred tonnes of contraband produce yesterday that has already been seized.
Two truckloads of European tomatoes and three of nectarines and peaches were being smashed with a tractor and bulldozer in the Smolensk region after they arrived with fake documents, the food safety agency said.
One truck driver carrying a cargo of suspicious tomatoes turned his vehicle around and made a getaway back into Belarus to avoid them being destroyed, Rosselkhoznadzor said.
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