Cigarettes for smokers are “an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road,” Francis Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a 1936 short story that The New Yorker published 76 years later.
What the World Bank categorizes as one of mankind’s four leading causes of death, puffing on the cancer-causing sticks is becoming less popular in Ukraine. There is currently an estimated 8.1 million regular smokers, some two million less than in 2008.
Oddly, tobacco production in Ukraine is growing four percent this year as cigarette companies attempt to flood the market with cheap cigarettes, many of them getting smuggled illegally abroad.
“Smoking is not in vogue in Ukraine anymore,” says Andriy Skipalsky, head of Zhyttya, a Kyiv-based anti-tobacco group inspired by billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. “Only those with significant smoking experience keep the habit, while the youth is not attracted to it as much as they used to be.”
Smokers are much costlier to employers than non-smokers, which is another strong anti-tobacco force, he adds.
The nation’s $3.1 billion tobacco market filled state coffers with $2 billion last year, although the figure could have been $230 million bigger, according to global audit firm EY, if not for an underground market that absorbs 15 percent of cigarette sales.
This year’s tobacco-related budget revenue could grow even higher, since on Sept. 1 the cigarette excise tax rose by five percentage points to 55 percent. Still, Ukraine has among the cheapest cigarettes in Europe.
Skipalsky, moreover, says the shadow tobacco market could be even larger, since a quarter of the 80 billion cigarette sticks produced in Ukraine enters the European Union illegally.
Natalya Mykolaenko, spokeswoman for Imperial Tobacco, a cigarette producer, acknowledged that the nation’s illegal cigarette market continues to grow.
The Kyiv Post easily discovered at least four public selling points where individual cigarettes are illegally sold in a city of 3 million: near Khreshchatyk, Lva Tolstoho, Universytet and Zhytomyrska metro stations. There are more. Yet the non-regulated, secondary market for tobacco was essentially bigger a decade ago.
Philip Morris, which together with Imperial Tobacco control half the market, refused to comment on the issue. An industry lobbyist, Ukrtyutyun, followed suit. Meanwhile, Lev Myrymsky, a member of parliament who has advocated for smokers’ rights, called questions about the tobacco market “unimportant” in a telephone interview with the Kyiv Post.
However, Myrymsky’s colleagues — Vitaliy Homutynnik, Oleksandra Kuzhel and Sergiy Teryokhin — still take a pro-tobacco stance, says Zhyttya’s Skipalsky. When asked about this by the Kyiv Post, Teryokhin said he never lobbied anything that would go against public interest. Meanwhile, the other two deputies didn’t answer the Kyiv Post’s request for a comment. Moreover, fugitive former Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, a devoted smoker himself, blocked many anti-tobacco initiatives that activists led by lawmaker Lesya Orobets tried pushing forward.
Borys Kolesnikov, another member of parliament who was a member of Azarov’s Cabinet of Ministers, controls Hamadey, a small Donetsk-based cigarette maker, according to an investigation by Tetyana Chornovol. As a Cabinet member, Kolesnikov opposed anti-tobacco policies too. However, he denied any relation to Hamadey: “I don’t know such a company at all. Four years ago, Tanya Chornovol wrote that I have some relation to Hamadey, because I opposed the additional (anti-smoking) stickers on the tobacco products during a Cabinet meeting…”
Since advertising tobacco products is illegal, marketing firms provide “gray” ad services to producers that are ready to pay as much as $700 to retailers for the exclusive right to rearrange packs of cigarettes in a window case to give certain brands more visibility, according to information provided by Zhyttya.
Yuriy Rybachuk, 40, a Rivne-born writer on cultural affairs, has been smoking for the past 10 years. He pays $1.60 for a package of Parliament Aqua Blue and admits smoking is nasty. “ My first cigarette brought me an excitement close to sexual, but I don’t feel anything even close to it anymore,” he says. “Each smoked cigarette brings several minutes of psychological relief. I smoke a lot while working.”
Rybachuk belongs to the 45 percent share of Ukraine’s men who seek “psychological relief” through smoking, while only 11 percent of women smoke for the same reason, most of whom in urban areas. This puts Ukraine in the global top-30 club of most smoking nations.
Poland, a rather successful European Union country that serves as a comparison base for many Ukrainian development figures, is not in the club. The share of smokers in both sexes is equal there and barely exceeds 25 percent.
Kyiv Post associate business editor Ivan Verstyuk can be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv Post intern Iryna Matviyishyn contributed reporting, she can be reached at [email protected].
