Originally appeared at DNInews
According to the press service of the Ukrainian President, Poroshenko said that for the Russian leader Vladimir Putin the Crimea is a territory to be populated with natives of Siberia, reports the Politnavigator.
‘For Putin, the Crimea is a territory which should be inhabited by natives of Siberia who are urgently being transported there now. For me, the Crimea is a Ukrainian land. And the Crimeans are Ukrainians. I will do everything to ensure the return of the Crimea, through judicial decisions and the political and diplomatic path developed as a result of the strategy and use of international legal mechanisms we worked on, in particular, in Paris. There are no alternatives to this path,’ said Poroshenko.
Poroshenko also reminded that in early November, after consultations with the political forces, he asked the government to impose a regime of closing customs checkpoints for trucks.
‘We really can not afford cargoes to go into the occupied territory of the annexed Crimea without any effective monitoring and police,’ he pointed out.
Ukraine is also outraged with the supply of electricity to the Crimea from Russia, reports The Sputnikbig.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has expressed an official protest against the visit to the Crimea of the Russian President Vladimir Putin who opened the first line of the energy bridge connecting the mainland of Russia to the peninsula.
Apparently, Kiev found the disruption of the energy blockade violating the rights of the Ukrainian authorities. The attitude of the Ukrainian authorities to the energy blockade of the Crimea always raised a lot of questions. On the one hand, Kiev claimed to have nothing to do with it. On the other hand, no state officials did anything to investigate the undermining of the power transmission towers, which can be regarded as a terrorist attack, or to prevent activities of such dangerous “activists”.
No less strange is the situation in the country’s media. At first they speak about some “unknown” persons who de-energised the Crimea, taking the real perpetrators of the undermining out of the responsibility; then they talk about the benefits of such a step for Ukraine and strongly support such a questionable, from many points of view, activity.
Now the Ukrainian media has reached the level of blatant lies with the Press of Ukraine publishing the following article: “Crimean resident who do not have electricity will be jailed”
“The peninsula residents in whose homes there is still no electricity are to keep quiet about it, otherwise they will be jailed. It was announced by the “prosecutor” of the peninsula Natalia Poklonskaya during a meeting of the Crimean police. The “prosecutor” is convinced that the information about the electricity still not having been restored on the peninsula is ‘provocations of Ukrainian Internet trolls’ that still exist among the Crimean journalists and spread ‘false information’ on the local forums. ‘After yesterday’s opening of the first line of the energy bridge by the President Vladimir Putin the situation is almost leveled off,’ said Poklonskaya, pointing out that the situation with the lighting of the peninsula was ‘improving every day’. The “prosecutor” believes that those residents of the Crimea who deny the presence of electricity in their homes should bear an administrative responsibility. ‘So far in the form of imprisonment for 15 days,’ she summed up.”
The opening of the first line of the energy bridge openly showed that the Crimea is well underway to the energy independence from Ukraine. The latter, on the other hand, has not only lost a huge energy market but coal supplies from Donbass as well, with the DPR authorities announcing two days after de-energising the Crimea that coal supplies to Ukraine were completely stopped.
After that the Ukrainian authorities suddenly decided that electricity supply to the Crimea from Ukraine should and would be restored. The Minister of Energy, the Prime Minister and then the President of Ukraine declared that the emergency power supply via one of the four lines leading from Ukraine to the Crimea would be restored in the near future. They explained the necessity of it by an ecological disaster that might otherwise happen in the region, which possibility hadn’t occurred to them during at least a week of the total blackout on the peninsula.
Moreover, previously the company “Ukrenergo” stated that restoring the supply of electricity to the Crimea required the consent of the supporters of the energy blockade of the peninsula who hadn’t even let repair crews to the undermined transmission towers. After the official statements, though, participants of the “civil energy blockade” miraculously saw the light and agreed on the supply of electricity via one of the four high-voltage lines. Which gave the President Poroshenko an opportunity to make a good show of “taking the opinion of the Crimean Tatars into consideration”.
‘I think that the emergency supply via one line will be restored soon, by the way, in consultations with the Crimean Tatars,’ he said in an interview to Ukrainian TV channels.
However, residents of the Crimea are no longer concerned about the Ukrainian crazy “through a looking glass”. According to the “Moscow Komsomolets”, after starting the energy bridge Kuban – Crimea most of the Crimean people noted the improvement in the situation with electricity.
‘A hit of the last week was a statement of the Ukrainian President Poroshenko that ‘Ukraine is ready to resume electricity supplies to the Crimea, and if Putin hadn’t come there on Wednesday, it would already have been done’. Which means that, if the President of the Russian Federation hadn’t suddenly come to the de-energised Crimea to give it the light, Ukraine would have been so kind to do what it had been promising to do for ten day but hadn’t somehow managed to. However, this Ukrainian crazy “through a looking glass” is no longer a concern of residents of the peninsula’
Even though the situation with electricity is far from being ideal, after starting the first line of the energy bridge the peninsula has reached an economical but stable mode of electricity supply. The heat and light have returned to homes of the Crimeans. They have the electricity only for 12 hours a day, which is enough only for housing and social facilities, but even this is already good. Soon schools and enterprises will start working.
The Crimean news website carried out a survey asking the population of the peninsula how the situation with electricity had changed over the past two days. 40.2% of those asked said it was ‘so much better’. 27.4% of the respondents gave the answer ‘a little better’. For 12.8% of people ‘nothing has changed’, while 15.4% of respondents stated that at their places the electricity ‘isn’t cut off at all’. And only 1.1% said that it had become ‘worse’.
After the energy blockade of the peninsula having failed, one of its organisers, Lenur Islyamov, promised the Crimeans another, without revealing its details, though, because, as he said, ‘It is a military operation’.
The Head of the Crimea Sergey Aksyonov said that his words shouldn’t be taken seriously, explaining that crazy organisers of a naval blockade had nothing but boats to start it with. And yet, it is crazy ones from whom anything whatsoever can be expected. So, the Crimean authorities are not to relax yet.