MOSCOW — In recent years, trade relations
between Russia and theNetherlands have at times blossomed and at times
wilted. This summer they went up in smoke.
A week after Russia began burning and burying European food items like cheese and peaches deemed to have
been imported illegally, Russian agricultural inspectors started torching
flowers from the Netherlands that they said were insect ridden, in what has
become known locally as the flower war.
While similar to the food demolition, which
brought widespread outrage as well as the production of satirical videos like
the popular “Death of a Parmesan,” the politics behind the flower war are
distinct.
The timing of the Russian crackdown on Dutch
flowers has closely coincided with important milestones in the Dutch-led
investigation into the shooting down last summer of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, which killed all 298 people on board, most of
them from the Netherlands.
Russia denies any involvement in the tragedy and
has made the unsubstantiated and, Western officials say, far-fetched charge
that a Ukrainian fighter jet or missile downed the plane.
But step by step, the methodical Dutch investigation has been corroborating the United States’ early assertion that
the airliner was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile supplied by Russia to
separatists in eastern Ukraine. And every important step in the investigation
has been met with enhanced inspections of Dutch flower exports by Russian
agencies.
On July 27, the Russian agricultural inspection
agency, Rosselkhoznadzor, said it had discovered 183 shipments of Dutch
flowers infested with numerous insects, including California thrips. That was two days before the Netherlands and
three other countries put to a vote in the United Nations Security Council a proposal to form a tribunal to prosecute
and punish those responsible for shooting down the plane.
The vote forced Russia into the embarrassing
position of vetoing the proposal alone. On Aug. 10, Rosselkhoznadzor stepped up
inspections for thrips and leaf miner.
Last Tuesday, after prosecutors from the
Netherlands said crash investigators had found parts of what could be a
Russian-made surface-to-air missile system in or near the debris field in
eastern Ukraine, Russian inspectors made a big show of setting fire to boxes of
roses and chrysanthemums in two Russian towns.
“These are freshly cut flowers from the
Netherlands infected with western California flower thrips,” the chief sanitary
inspector for Rosselkhoznadzor, Yekaterina Slakova, said in a televised
appearance as workers burned boxes of roses.
The tit for tat has been so obvious that even
pro-Kremlin commentators have dropped the pretense, saying the flower burning
is intended as a warning to the Netherlands over risks to trade if the
investigation proceeds unfavorably for Russia.
“This is connected to the Malaysian Boeing,”
Sergei A. Markov, a former member of Parliament in the pro-government United
Russia party, said in a telephone interview. “Russia is certain that the Dutch
government is falsifying this investigation,” he said, but cannot say so
directly.
The stepped-up flower inspections, he said, are
the Kremlin’s means of communicating displeasure with the inquiry.
“It is an attempt to talk in not such an obvious
way, softly, a bit byzantine,” Mr. Markov said of the message of the flower
burning. “I generally like byzantine. But this is not a great quality in this
case. Our diplomats should have just called things by their names.”
Dutch floral industry officials agree that the
flower inspections have been mostly for show, so far.
With its greenhouses, auction houses, and trucks
and trains running like clockwork, the Netherlands provides an estimated 40
percent of all fresh-cut flowers and houseplants sold in Russia, last year
worth about 283 million euros, or about $314 million at the current exchange
rate.
So far at least, only a few hundred blooms have
gone up in flames, not a significant disruption to flower shop deliveries.
“The Russians wanted to show they are serious
about the issue, but it didn’t really have a huge impact,” said Robert
Roodenburg, director of the Dutch Association of Wholesale Floricultural
Products.
Lex van Horssen, a spokesman at FloraHolland, the Netherlands’ largest flower auction house,
declined to speculate on the coincidence of the flower burning in Russia and
Dutch progress in investigating the plane crash.
“To be quite honest, we have a business to run,
and that is something different than the political situation,” Mr. van Horssen
said. “We will not mix our business with this political issue. That’s not a good idea.”
Many Russians assume the flower war will play
out pretty much like the much publicized destruction of European food imports
this month, with a big show for the cameras and little follow-through. They
note that European cheeses are still widely available, somehow, at upscale
cafes in the Russian capital. On a recent, velvety midsummer evening on a
summer terrace, a waiter delivered a groaning cheese platter, staring blankly
when asked where the cheese had come from.
Aleksei A. Navalny, a Russian opposition leader
and anticorruption activist, last week republished public tenders from state
agencies ordering banned food products. The Moscow mayor’s office, for example,
ordered catering worth $71,500 that included Brie, Gruyère, Roquefort and
Dorblu. The Ministry of Interior published a tender for catering that included
mozzarella and Parmesan.
“They eat Dorblu cheese, dab their mouths with a
napkin, and then turn to the camera and talk about how right it is to destroy
European products,” Mr. Navalny wrote on his blog.
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