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 The televised raid this week on a doctor's surgery in the
Khmelnytsky region is one of hundreds of criminal investigations
publicised by the authorities in a clampdown on a flourishing black
market in forged vaccine and COVID-19 test documents.
After a lull in the summer, Ukraine is experiencing some of the
highest death rates from COVID-19 in the world.
One of Europe's poorest countries, Ukraine lagged behind its
neighbours in procuring vaccines earlier this year. Now, as in other
former communist states in eastern Europe, it is struggling to
persuade a sceptical population to take them.
Only around 7 million Ukrainians out of a population of 41 million
are fully jabbed against COVID-19 and surveys suggest around half of
adults do not want to be vaccinated.
The government has made the shots compulsory for some state
employees, and unvaccinated citizens face restrictions getting into
restaurants and sporting events. The new rules have prompted more
people to get vaccinated but also provided more incentive for those
who do not want vaccines to get fake ones.
Tetyana Mykhailevska, head doctor at the infectious diseases
department at Kyiv hospital number 3, said fake vaccination
certificates were prolonging the pandemic, and buying them was "now
probably the worst crime committed against the country and our
society".
"We are tired of this pandemic. We want to be ordinary doctors. I
am, for example, a cardiologist. I want to be a cardiologist, not a
COVID doctor. I want to have a good sleep instead of answering night
calls by my terrified patients," she told Reuters.
Vaccine hesitancy predates the pandemic – it contributed to a
measles outbreak in Ukraine in 2019 when a black market in fake
certificates also thrived. A poll in August by the Ilko Kucheriv
Democratic Initiatives Foundation said 56% of the population did not
plan to get vaccinated against COVID-19 soon.
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 In the city of Sumy in
north-eastern Ukraine, law enforcement caught a
man hawking fake vaccine certifications on
social media. For a fee of 3,000 hryvnia ($114),
he would arrange for a doctor to enter people's
names as vaccinated on Ukraine's national
database, a statement by the prosecutor
general's office said. In a
separate case in the town of Chernihiv, police said they caught a
52-year-old travel agent selling fake certificates for $250 each and
producing about 20 of them a day.
The Ukrainian border guard service says it has found 350 forged
certificates since August. There have also been instances of people
buying fake vaccine certificates and then later wanting to get the
real vaccine, a doctor at a Kyiv vaccination centre told Reuters.
"Ukraine has been close to drowning in forged vaccination
certificates," Deputy Interior Minister Yevhenii Yenin said, warning
those found guilty would "not escape punishment. Do not become
coronavirus accomplices. Get vaccinated."
But some Ukrainians are still not planning to comply.
"If there is a question of choosing vaccination or dismissal, I will
either try to buy a certificate or leave," said Olena, a Kyiv
resident who gave only her first name.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Natalia Zinets, Ilya Zhegulev, Sergiy
Karazy, Stanislav Kozlyuk, Valentyn Ogirenko and Margaryta
Chornokondratenko; Writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Peter
Graff)
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