On 17 May 2021, ICMPD within the EU-funded project "EU Support to Strengthening Integrated Border Management in Ukraine (EU4IBM)" launched the pilot initiative on prevention of cross-border crime at the green border between Ukraine and Romania. The pilot includes elements of technical re-equipment as well as joint capacity building and anti-corruption trainings implemented on the basis of the new infrastructure.
As the start of the pilot, over 17-18 May, an expert group carried out a field assessment of the selected segment of the Ukraine-EU land border in order to diagnose the existing border protection infrastructure and its vulnerabilities to smuggling and to other cross-border crime, as well as to formulate the turnkey solution to be implemented. As a next step, the group will prepare technical specifications for the border protection equipment and a roadmap for its deployment, complemented with manpower capacity development exercises.
The launched pilot is based on a thorough analysis of the counter cross-border crime measures and practices used at green borders, which was previously carried out by the project. The experts analysed the business process of land border surveillance to identify the bottlenecks and no-value steps. In addition, a risk analysis expert assessed the selected segment to review the means applied so far and challenges faced by the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine (SBGS) due to its topographical peculiarities. The optimising and reengineering alongside with the assessment findings include a wide range of recommendations: from streamlining the processes to using modern technical border protection solutions, as well as anti-corruption and motivation elements. In the following months, SBGS and EU4IBM project will be jointly implementing the recommendations to pilot the proposed border protection solution.