Gennadiy Grigoryevich Onishchenko (, born 20 November 1950) is a Russian government official who was the Chief Sanitary Inspector of Russia from 1996 to 2013. Early life Gennady Onishchenko was born on 20 November 1950 in Changyr-Tash village, modern Kyrgyzstan. In 1973 he graduated from the M. Gorky Donetsk State Medical Institute. He is a Candidate Master of Sports in weightlifting. From 1973 to 1987 he worked in the Ministry of Railways of the USSR as a doctor-epidemiologist. In 1982 he became the chief sanitary doctor of the Moscow metro, in 1983 — the head of the central sanitary and epidemiological station of the Ministry of Railways. In 1988 he was appointed Deputy Head of the Main Directorate of Quarantine Infections of the USSR Ministry of Health. Onishchenko participated in the liquidation of the Chernobyl disaster. In the fall of 1995, during the First Chechen War, Onishchenko was kidnapped on the way from Mozdok to Grozny, and was held captive by Chechen separatists. From 1993 to 2002 he was a member of the Constructive-Ecological Movement of Russia "Kedr", transformed into the Russian Ecological Party "The Greens" in 2002. On June 24, 2009, Eduard Kokoity granted Onishchenko honorary citizenship of South Ossetia. Chief Sanitary Inspector From 1996 to 2013 Onishchenko was the Chief State Sanitary Doctor of Russia and ex officio First Deputy Minister of Health. Since 2004 he was the head of newly established Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection (Rospotrebnadzor). During Onishchenko's 17-year-long tenure his department made numerous radical and controversial actions: In March 2006, Rospotrebnadzor completely banned the import of Georgian and Moldovan wines to Russia, motivating this step with the non-compliance of a significant part of them with sanitary standards. The Georgian government recognized the presence of a large mass of counterfeits on the Georgian wine market and initiated criminal cases against the management of a number of wineries. According to a VCIOM poll, 71% of the Russians supported the restrictions imposed by Onishchenko. Since June 2009, Rospotrebnadzor has banned the import of almost 500 types of dairy products from Belarus, and then another 800 due to the fact that Belarusian producers did not re-register documents in accordance with Russian technical regulations for milk. The Belarusian delegation did not attend the CSTO summit in Moscow on June 15, explaining their move by "economic discrimination" from one of the CSTO countries. In October 2012, speaking on