Police in Kharkov, Ukraine regularly target dark-skinned foreigners for extortion, according to a July 19, 2008 article in the local newspaper "Vecherny Khakov." The article quotes Evgeny Zakharov--head of the Kharkov Human Rights Protection Committee--as saying that his group conducted a survey of 68 foreign students in the city, and that only two of them reported that they had never been stopped for document checks by police. Several of the students complained that police did not even ask them for their document, but went right into demands for bribes. A Jordanian man quoted in the article added that he is constantly stopped by police asking for "beer money." Mr. Zakharov also stated that over the past few years, racist attacks in Kharkov have "sharply increased" including several murders and an attack on an Ethiopian man who was knocked unconscious last year, as well as a June 28 march on the campus of Kharkov State University during which neo-Nazis openly made racist threats.

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