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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Yevhen Plinskyy compared the situation at the customs post Ostyluh with last year's scandal at Smilnytsia.
At the Ostyluh checkpoint of the Volyn customs, a situation has developed that journalist Yevhen Plinskyy compares to the story at the Smilnytsia post of the Lviv customs a year ago. According to his claim, on certain shifts minibuses can cross the border, declaring only part of the actual volume of goods. The journalist suggests that after a temporary halt this practice may resume.
This is what Yevhen Plinskyy wrote in his post, also recalling colleague Taras Serediych's material about the situation at Ostilyuz.
According to Plinskyy, dozens of minibuses from the Polish side form kilometer-long queues, and on two of the four working shifts, as he claims, the transport passes without proper customs clearance. The journalist states that only a 30% of the actual volume of goods is declared, while the rest supposedly crosses the border without proper inspection.
As the author notes, ordinary carriers reported the situation, tired of multi-hour queues. According to him, they drew attention to the fact that on certain shifts Ostyluh effectively operates a selective pass regime, which, as the journalist claims, implies unofficial payments.
Plinskyy reported that investigators from the Department for Combating Smuggling and Violations of Customs Rules and the Subdivision of Customs Control and Clearance have already arrived in Volyn. According to him, the shift leaders, whom he calls the performers of the described scheme, were removed from work.
At the same time, the journalist forecasts that the story may end only with a temporary shutdown of operations with subsequent resumption. He draws a parallel with last year’s incident at Smilnytsia, which he had previously covered, and believes that the principle situation has not changed.
Plinskyy gave particular attention to the leadership of the State Customs Service headed by Orest Mandziy. The journalist directly stated that he does not believe Mandziy personally allowed the described practice, despite Taras Serediy's assertions in his posts. In Plinskyy’s view, instead, individual subordinates on the ground and in key departments could have started acting independently.
As the journalist notes, Mandziy’s team had long promised to retrain customs workers, but did not launch it, did not implement the promised rotation of customs officers, and did not clarify whether the weighing equipment at all checkpoints is functional. Plinskyy believes that the absence or malfunction of scales may facilitate manipulations with the weight of goods crossing the border.
He also drew attention to pressure due to accumulation of goods and transport from the Polish side of the border. According to Plinskyy, since the start of Mandziy’s team’s work, shipments had not been carried out in the described scale, but now at certain checkpoints, notably Ostyluh, the movement of goods, as he put it, has fully resumed.
Another important aspect the journalist highlighted is the events of January 2026 of the year. According to him, then a team of NABU detectives led by Orest Mandziy exposed a system of funds collection at Volyn customs, where the monthly amount, as Plinskyy claims, amounted to $850 thousand hryvnias and was intended to be transmitted to Kyiv.
The journalist said that among the seized materials there was a so-called “comb” — a document in which, according to him, the participants in the collection of funds, sources of income, and the mechanism of distributing money between the State Customs Service structures and law enforcement representatives were detailed.
Plinskyy asserts that the main participants in the funds collection in Volyn in January 2026 year and the coordinators of shipments through Ostyluh in October 2026 year are the same people. In his view, this means that the working mechanisms have not changed. At the same time, his post does not provide specific documentary evidence to support this claim.
The journalist asked why Mandziy’s team, which, in his words, should understand the internal mechanisms of Volyn customs, allowed a repetition of a similar situation. He did not provide answers to this question, calling it a mystery.
At the end of the post, Plinskyy expressed concern that the situation at Ostyluzh could be used by opponents of customs reform to criticize changes in the system. He noted that the scandal could become a pretext to assert the reform’s failure, and asked what supporters of changes could say in response to such criticism.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Євген Плінський порівняв ситуацію на митному посту «Устилуг» із торішнім скандалом на «Смільниці»". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: ANTIKOR.
