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Russia’s food fight: bulldozed cheese, incinerated bacon

Russia has marked a one-year retaliatory ban on food from Australia and other Western nations by steam rolling more than 300 tonnes of produce in a single day.

Officials enforcing ‘counter-sanctions’ against the West’s trade sanctions against Russia ordered the dramatic display on Thursday.

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Russian media showed dramatic pictures of bulldozers crushing boxes of cheese, fruit and vegetables in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine.

Illegal bacon was also reportedly thrown into an incinerator at Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport.

Two truckloads of European tomatoes and three of nectarines and peaches were smashed with a tractor and bulldozer in the Smolensk region after they arrived with fake documents, Russia’s food safety agency Rosselkhoznadzor said.

The 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.

“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.

The agency said 319 tonnes was destroyed over the day.

While the Russian government has enjoyed public support during the sanctions, the move sparked an outcry from the religious leaders and anti-poverty groups who said the imports could have been given to the needy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin imposed the bans last year in retaliation for western sanctions levelled against Moscow over the Ukrainian conflict.

– with ABC

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