Border guards and law enforcement officer shave exposed a criminal group illegally smuggling migrants and drugs from Turkey to the European Union in Ukraine’s southern regions.
“It was established that, on the territory of Kherson and Mykolayiv oblasts, an organized group is engaged in the transfer of illegal migrants from Turkey to the EU countries, in particular, Greece and Italy,” the national police said in a statement on Oct. 23.
Border guards found ship tickets; yacht, vessel inspection and maritime certificates; notebooks and narcotics upon further searches in the homes of the criminals.
The criminals independently built the yachts for transportation, forged the documents and assigned identities and numbers to individuals involved in the scheme.
There are currently 300 Ukrainians serving sentences for human smuggling and related crimes in Greece.
“There are many Ukrainians in Greek prisons. Our citizens are being deceived into working on cruise liners and yachts, and then are forced, under penalty of death, to smuggle illegal migrants across the sea to Europe. That is why hundreds of Ukrainian sailors have been detained by Greek law enforcement agencies, ”Liudmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, wrote in 2018 aftermore than 110 Ukrainians were imprisoned in Greece on charges of smuggling migrants.
In the smugglers’ scheme, a yacht with a “curator” and two recruited Ukrainians would leave one of the Ukrainian ports to a designated point off the coast of Turkey, where migrants would board the boat, Ukrainian law enforcement said. The curator would then leave the yacht and return to Ukraine by plane, and the two Ukrainian citizens would travel to the EU with the illegal migrants.
