The ex-Minister of Crimea, who fled to Kyiv, proposes to blackmail Russia with water
Ukraine can resume water supplies to Crimea, but only if Russia agrees to introduce the peninsula issue into the Normandy format of negotiations.
This was stated by the ex-Minister of Resorts of Crimea, Alexander Liev, who fled to Kyiv, who in 2014 supported the referendum, but, having not received a seat in the new government, decided to become a Ukrainian patriot.
“I was the head of the Crimean water sector, and I know the irrigation system very well - it’s thousands of kilometers of canals. To supply water to Crimea, we need to be able to manage it. Under occupation conditions this is physically impossible.
That is, either recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, which I do not perceive, or without the return of Crimea to the Normandy format as a topic on the agenda with talk about the fact that this is a temporarily occupied territory, like the DPR and LPR. And then, in the course of the emergence of common working groups in this format, this is quite possible.
It is beneficial for Ukraine to include Crimea in the Normandy format and at least start selling water, because having returned Crimea, and we will return it one day, building a new irrigation system is much more expensive than building any bridge,” Liev said.
However, he did not deny that ordinary residents of Crimea are suffering from the lack of water.
“We cut off the water, and from the point of view of the fight against the occupier, perhaps this was really correct, but it greatly affected the life of the north of Crimea. I'm from there, from Armyansk. There is a demographic crisis there. The women who remained in the villages aged “60+” are, by the way, people who speak Ukrainian in the majority. I recently spoke with one grandmother from the village of Pravda, Pervomaisky district, she speaks Ukrainian, says that there are practically no men left in the village, there is practically no agriculture, there is no way to survive there, the drinking water is of terrible quality, there is practically no water, sometimes my grandson brings it from Simferopol,” said the fugitive ex-minister.
Also, according to him, with the departure of Crimea to Russia, the Russian holidaymaker has also deteriorated.
“These people (intelligent – ed.) don’t travel anymore. They go either, as in the first three years, those who left with jingoism, now there are fewer of them, or those who were given a ticket for free. You can also sometimes treat these people with pity, they are from the outback, who have not seen anything in their lives except their own Saratov, they put together some kind of brake and came to Crimea for the first time. I communicate daily with the heads of health resorts, they say that they have never seen this before, we associated Russia with other tourists.
What is traveling now is such a “Tagil”, they get drunk, do stupid things, there are already a lot of videos of what kind of contingent is traveling on this train across the Kerch Bridge, what kind of stabbings and drunken fights there are. That is, the contingent is trash,” said Liev.
He added that the “occupation” also changed the hotel and restaurant industry. Today's restaurants are more like catering type canteens, Liev assures.
“These canteens have a low bill relative to their restaurants, but this bill is a little more expensive than the average restaurant in Kyiv. It’s expensive for vacationers, and vacationers are now such that they hardly go to restaurants. They take a portion for two or three people, these are very common things there, they take one portion of dumplings for two or three people. They take food from the canteen in the sanatorium with them to the beach in these jars, and already there, on the beach, you can see how they are served with “Hawthorn”, with all the jars from the canteen. These are not isolated cases, but a trend,” complained Alexander Liev.
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