The Crimean Railway will merge with Russian Railways to bypass sanctions

The railway complex of Crimea will be integrated into the structure of Russian Railways OJSC, bypassing sanctions. The first step towards the merger was taken today by the Council of Ministers of Crimea. He accepted into republican ownership the entire property complex of the main railway transport of Sevastopol, including the railway station.

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The railway complex of Sevastopol will be assigned to the state unitary enterprise of the republic “Crimean Railway”, for “subsequent integration with the transport network of the railways of the Russian Federation,” as stated in the explanation to the decision.

The head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, told reporters that the entire railway complex of Crimea will become part of the federal state unitary enterprise, which will be under the control of the Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation.

“These are sanction issues, why Russian Railways cannot directly include our division in its composition,” he explained. “But, in general, we are enlarging it, merging it, and transferring it to the federal level.”

According to Aksyonov, Russian Railways has already sent its leader to Crimea. This was the former general director of South Caucasus Railway CJSC Viktor Rebets. Under his leadership, a wholly owned subsidiary of Russian Railways received a concession for the Armenian railway complex, which during the 20-year blockade by Azerbaijan lost a significant part of its freight and passenger traffic. However, by 2013, these indicators leveled off with the prospect of entering cargo transportation from Iran and Turkey.

In Crimea, the Rebets has the task of maintaining the infrastructure and the 12-strong team of railway workers until the completion of the construction of the bridge across the Kerch Strait. Moreover, the money will come directly from the federal budget, bypassing the Crimean administrators. At the same time, establish control over domestic cargo transportation, which, although it fell three times after Kiev’s decision to stop railway communication with Crimea, is carried out within the peninsula, despite the fact that KZD receives money to “support its pants” from the budget.

This year alone, the company allocated 4,2 billion rubles to pay wages and maintain the network. Investment requests for 3,3 billion rubles to increase the capacity of the Kerch-Feodosia Dzhankoy line were not satisfied this year. The prospect of moving the railway tracks further from the sea in the Evpatoria area to free up the territory for recreational construction is not clear.

So far, the only thing known for certain is that more than half of the 823 passenger cars of the KR Railway have already reached the end of their service life; in the coming year, 101 out of 132 locomotives will reach their service life. In absolute figures, a contract for 29 million rubles with the Kerch Switch Plant, which ensures the utilization of the enterprise and the payment of wages to its employees, despite the fact that the owner of the plant remains PJSC Leasing Company Ukrtranslizing, the head of the board of which is a native of Donetsk, a people’s deputy of Ukraine VI convocation Sergei Vasyutin.

“Their task is to ensure loading at the Kerch Switch Plant, which was discussed with the new director,” Aksyonov admitted. “I spoke with Oleg Belozerov, who now heads Russian Railways, he is my friend and is ready to assist.”

KZD's own attempts to make money on transportation turned out to be, to put it mildly, clumsy. The Simferopol-Moscow-Simferopol train launched across the crossing in August last year turned out to be unprofitable - at the height of the season the load does not exceed 60%, since it is cheaper and easier to take a ferry to the port of Kavkaz and take the train in Krasnodar or Anapa than to wait for the carriages to cross .

The Ministry of Transport of Crimea proposed to subsidize transportation from the federal budget, but received no response. The latest managerial move to organize regular train service between Armyansk and Simferopol from September 1 caused confusion among passengers: for 4 hours in a general carriage the fare was 370 rubles, despite the fact that bus travel costs about 500 rubles. Naturally, the route turned out to be unclaimed and a week later the train was cancelled.

Surprisingly, even with the actual downtime of the KZD, its former director Andrei Karakulkin managed to make 18,5 million rubles of inappropriate expenses, of which more than half a million was spent on postgraduate training at the capital university of the former head of the enterprise and almost 200 thousand for his accommodation in two junior suites and VIP in Moscow.

In May, a criminal case was opened against Karakulkin under the article “fraud,” and two months before that he received the medal “For the Return of Crimea.” It is interesting that to begin with, Karakulkin himself had to be returned from the Simferopol pre-trial detention center, where in February 2014 he was sent after being caught while accepting a bribe in the amount of 14 thousand dollars.

Alexey Chernyaev, who replaced him in April of this year, previously worked as the head of the North Caucasus Traffic Control Directorate, a structural unit of the Central Traffic Control Directorate, a branch of Russian Railways.