Around Moscow
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MOSCOW, August 24 (RIA Novosti) - Begging...
generally earn more. The most financially successful of beggars are children, pregnant women, the disabled and the elderly, although their purported age, handicaps and other "circumstances" often turn out to be fake in police checks.A 47-year-old woman named Yekaterina, interviewed by Vesti, is a longtime metro beggar who pretends to be a hunch-backed babushka. However, an elderly lady from Ukraine, who usually stands in an underpass outside the Paveletskaya Station, is over 70. She says she cannot survive on her retirement benefit and is happy to have "extra money for food, medicine and a mobile phone."
Moscow police officials have repeatedly pledged to remove beggars from the Metro. They clamp down on begging ahead of major events in the capital, but the vagrants invariably return afterwards. The Metro is also a shelter for the homeless in winter.
Official statistics say there are about 10,000 homeless in Moscow, but NGOs put the figure ten times higher.
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