Tobacco.org

• The Eastern Cigarettes Underground 

This dialogue recurred dozens of times on the illegal cigarette route along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. A team of undercover reporters from the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism (www.crji.org) together with Ukrainian colleagues tracked down smuggling routes through the European Union's Eastern borders.

Romanian and Ukrainian smugglers offered the investigative team duty-free cigarettes, illegally manufactured cigarettes, fake brands such as LML (an imitation of L&M) as well as legally produced Ukrainian cigarettes that illegally entered Romania through border check points or the so-called "green zone," the mountainous areas between them

Officials from both countries complain about the growing level of cigarette smuggling but little is done to stop it.

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