Staunton, Aug. 28 – Russia has the longest land border in the world, more than 22,000 kilometers – but despite the huge amounts of money Moscow spends on guarding it, it has never been the impenetrable one that Russians and many in the West imagine it to be, according to Important Stories journalist Irina Dolinina says.
There are many places where the Russian border is anything but heavily defended, as the Ukrainian move into Kursk Oblast has shown, she says (us5.campaign-archive.com/?u=4ea5740c1fe71d71fea4212ee&id=d982559d40 reposted in abridged form at meduza.io/en/feature/2024/08/28/russia-spends-billions-on-protecting-its-border-so-why-is-it-so-easy-to-break-through).
Moscow, Dolinina points out, has only 317 checkpoints along its land borders (rosgranstroy.ru), and the number of troops guarding them has been cut by more than a third from the 200,000 in service when Putin first became president (ps.fsb.ru/fps/smi/appearance/detail.htm%21id%3D10320833%40fsbAppearance.html).
The Russian government has sought to compensate for the reduction in the number of guards by installing electronic monitoring equipment, but that is so expensive that it hasn’t been put up everywhere – and those who want to evade government control know just where they can go to do so (gazeta.ru/army/2022/05/28/14916248.shtml).
As a result, and especially since the beginning of Putin’s war in Ukraine, there has been an increasingly brisk flow of people and contraband in and out of Russia, something Moscow seldom admits to but that various groups opposed to the war or in this business simply for the money are more than happy to point out.
According to Dolinina, Moscow acknowledges it can’t control the border without the help of locals and has launched expensive programs to recruit them, but these appear to be scattershot and with those who agree to help not being paid in a timely fashion (ura.news/news/1052644129, bel.ru/news/2022-07-26/na-podderzhku-belgorodskih-narodnyh-druzhin-napravyat-pochti-90-mln-rubley-353733 and mk-belgorod.ru/social/2023/06/23/belgorodskiy-druzhinnik-pozhalovalsya-na-otsutstvie-vyplat-za-may.html).
“By all appearances,” the investigative journalist says, “the holes in the Russian border won’t be plugged anytime soon.”
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