Can anyone confirm this?

[reader]

I've never visited Phuket and wonder if anyone has experienced the conditions described in this opinion piece from The Thaiger.

Russian brotherhood stealing Phuket jobs

Hotels are unwelcoming. In the massage parlours, everyone is tense. Down Walking Street, in the girly bars, excitement is high and the air is filled with fearful chatter. The girls are aquiver in anticipation. The Russian ‘brotherhood’ (bratva) stealing Phuket jobs is bringing a whole new style of beatings and rapes to Thailand’s peaceful brothels. How will the new regime of violence and exploitation compare to the old-school Thai versions?

Phuket is besieged by foreign gangs. They call themselves mafias – or at least the media does – but they are certainly not. Mafia means something. These “groups” are nothing more than gangs of thugs on the resort island to help the locals with their accounts.

The hospitality industry is worried. Executives are concerned that foreigners are exploiting laws to run businesses while taking up jobs meant for local people.

Isn’t Phuket already an enclaved of overseas money launderers, slavers, pimps, tax dodgers and traffickers in a spectrum of legality? They’ve been there a long time.

Once one of the most beautiful places in the world, Phuket today is more than a national embarrassment, it’s a matter of global shame.

The last wave of occupiers – welcomed with open legs by poor politicos who now live in millionaire pool villas – destroyed more or less anything that was good on the island. The ecosystem is destroyed, the forests have been destroyed, local culture has been destroyed, and the soil has been destroyed. All the birds and animals are dead. The beaches are filthy, plastic-strewn and over-crowded.

Speaking about tourism in the three Andaman provinces, Kata Group Resorts founder Pramookpisitt Achariyachai said some foreigners were breaching rules on jobs reserved for Thais. A small surprise considering that every news source in Thailand carries stories about labour shortages every day.

Pramookpisitt is concerned that foreign groups may take control of the island, similar to what happened in Pattaya a couple of decades ago.

Continues at

https://thethaiger.com/news/phuket/russian-brotherhood-stealing-phuket-jobs

[alvnv]

Could be worse… Russia could be concerned about discrimination of the rights of its citizens there and conduct a referendum on absorbing the province into the Russian Federation. In the process, Putin, the second greatest historian of all times (because Trump is the greatest everything of all times) would announce that all Thais are from Alt(h)ai and the Kingdom had never had any statehood outside of Altai Krai and Altai Republic, and the whole country should come back to Mother Russia as Novoaltai (New Altai).