Euphoria leaves Crimea after a year in Russia – Reuters
Moscow - Simferopol, March 12 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - “Rising prices, the appetites of bureaucrats, the arbitrariness of the security forces and the empty hotels of the Black Sea resort became a cold shower for the residents of Crimea, who joyfully perceived joining Russia as a prologue to prosperity,” - this is how he sums up the results. first anniversary of the annexation of Crimea Reuters.
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“A year after the annexation of the Ukrainian Crimea, for which Moscow paid with painful economic sanctions, and the peninsula with the curtailment of contacts with Western investors and the paralysis of the banking sector, the actors and unwitting participants in the drama that shook the world are balancing profits and losses.
“And Crimea will be the backwater of Russia. What's good? Prices are crazy, salaries are ridiculous,” grumbles 35-year-old taxi driver Nikolai, deftly steering between road potholes in the center of Simferopol, preserved from Ukrainian times.
“Business in Crimea has gotten worse. Our accountants are hanging themselves. We can’t adapt,” complains Mikhail Vorobyov, a 43-year-old building materials trader from Bakhchisarai, about the unusual Russian tax system.”
“The Crimean authorities hope that the devaluation of the ruble will discourage Russians from Turkish and Egyptian resorts. But the manager of one of the travel companies in Yalta, Ivan, cooled expectations. “Only the wealthy will fly on planes and mainly to Yalta,” he told Reuters. “Without a bridge there will be no tourism boom,” he told Reuters.
“The euphoria has not yet passed: people are spending their nest eggs. Which will end soon. Then everyone will grab their heads,” says 45-year-old Sergei. He moved to Crimea from Kyiv and got a job as a manager selling construction materials in one of the private companies in Simferopol. “If there had been no separation of Crimea from Ukraine, there would have been no war in Donbass,” said Sergei, covering the window in the kitchen so that the neighbors would not hear.
“In local economy class hypermarkets there are half-empty shelves and crowds of people, and prices are equal to Moscow,” the agency writes.
Moscow has declared Crimea a free economic zone, but entrepreneurs complain about obstacles, Reuters recalls. “In Ukraine, everything was simple, there was access to many databases (cadastre data), but now everything is closed,” says 41-year-old Sevastopol resident Emil Mustafaev, a cottage seller. He says that his business suffers from a shortage of finishing materials, which he previously purchased in Ukraine.
Reuters also writes about the claims of Western human rights activists regarding the oppression of the Crimean Tatars, but Crimean Prime Minister Sergei Aksenov said in an interview with the agency: “We now have a moratorium on searches of Tatars.” And in general, Aksenov notes, “I always tell Western journalists: please go out into the street and find me 10 dissatisfied people there,” the agency quotes him.
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