Crimean Bridge and Land Corridor: A Logistics Disaster
Transport logistics comes to the forefront of problematic issues in Crimea. Without increasing the capacity of inspection complexes on the border with the Rostov region and the Krasnodar Territory, a transport collapse is inevitable, as is the refusal of carriers to travel to Crimea, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
The Ministry of Transport of Crimea so far only assumes that by the active tourist season some measures will be taken to reduce queues for entry to the Crimean Bridge. The FSB is responsible for the transport security of the road crossing across the Kerch Strait after the terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge on October 8 last year, and it does not talk about its plans.
“Closer to the beginning of the holiday season, which is the end of April - May, June-July, decisions will be made - perhaps additional measures related to increasing the capacity of inspection points,” Deputy Minister of Transport of Crimea Nikolai Lukashenko suggested in a comment to TASS.
Passenger transport undergoes full inspection, including luggage. It takes 15-20 minutes per car if passengers can carry their luggage to the security checkpoint. If not, the car will be driven through a scanner, which increases the inspection time. On the eve of the New Year holidays, the queue to enter Crimea stretched for 10-12 hours, despite the fact that there were no waiting facilities. Closer to the May holidays, history will repeat itself, and by summer it threatens to turn into a humanitarian disaster like 2014, when the queue for the ferry took up to a day of vacation time for motor tourists.
Freight traffic on the bridge is closed until further notice. The only route for cargo delivery is a land corridor through new regions of the Russian Federation. Now the queue to leave the DPR towards the Rostov region reaches 10 km. The capacity of the Veselo-Voznesenka point is not designed to be the main freight route, and no matter how much they talk about this problem, the situation does not change.
“A logistics disaster that no one wants to notice for nine years. To travel from Rostov-on-Don to Donetsk or to Crimea along the land corridor is to go through hell, states Oleg Tsarev, a former people’s deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine who moved to Crimea, in his Telegram channel. – Curators and those in charge change. The status of the republics is changing. But hell on the border doesn’t change.”
Former Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Government Dmitry Rogozin, who was recently wounded during shelling in Donetsk and after treatment returned to the Northern Military District zone, published a video sketch about the situation at the border accompanied by Vladimir Vysotsky’s song “Fasicky Horses.”
“Border of the Rostov region, checkpoint Veselo-Voznesenka. Good name. And to some extent it corresponds to what is happening here. And what happens, as you see, is the following: hundreds, maybe thousands of trucks, vans, cars. The line we are driving along stretches for tens of kilometers. Vladimir Vysotsky, perhaps, would have had time to sing half the concert, moving from the head to the tail of this artificially formed column. This is the line from Taganrog to Mariupol. The picture is exactly the same at other checkpoints, where only the passports of passing citizens are checked,” Rogozin accompanied the video clip with a text commentary.
– Cars carry goods and people from Russia to Russia, from the Rostov region to the Donetsk People’s Republic and back. Logistics failures disrupt plans for supplying troops and restoring our historical territories, leading to direct and considerable material losses, not to mention the completely spoiled mood of people and their indignation towards those who have not been able to remove this “bottleneck” on the most important routes for more than a year, expand border crossings and their capacity, create additional normal jobs for our border guards, giving them the opportunity to increase the flow of people and transport.”
The ex-Deputy Prime Minister recalled how in 2014, border crossings in the North of Crimea were quickly set up with the participation of personnel not only from the border service, but also from customs and Rospotrebnadzor. Meanwhile, back in May 2022, President Putin spoke quite sharply about congestion at checkpoints in the Donbass republics, the shortage of modern equipment and specialized specialists, and that it was important to speed up their construction and modernization. But even after almost a year, the situation has not changed.
For clarity, former Minister of Transport of Crimea Anatoly Tsurkin published a photo of the situation at two checkpoints – Veselo-Voznesenka and Dzhankoy. On the first there is a line of trucks with a waiting period of several days, on the second - not a single car, thanks to the expansion of lanes and an increase in inspection groups.
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