[ad_1]
Larisa Vasilyeva says she killed her brother in the Crimean annex.
But Igor Vasiliev was not killed when the Black Sea peninsula took over Ukraine in 2014.
At the age of 67, he was too old to fight for pro-Russian separatists in southeastern Ukraine, so much so that they were inspired to “return to the homeland” of Crimea, where they took up arms against the central government.
Vasiliev has been battling a chronic heart disease for years.
Before the Kremlin allocated billions of dollars to restore Crimean infrastructure and reduce “optimized” health costs, the Urals Mountains had four ambulances on its outskirts of the city of Chelyabinsk, and one was always saved.
But on November 13, 2015, the only ambulance left was late, the sister said.
“He arrived three and a half hours later. To issue a death certificate,” said Vasilyeva, 71, who refused to identify the name of his village.
The annexation of Crimea raised the level of approval of President Vladimir Putin to 88 percent.
The sandy beaches, cypresses and wines of the Black Sea mainland peninsula seem to be a holiday paradise, as most of Russia’s coastline is the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean.
But if we look at Crimea seven years after consolidating the annexation through financial analysis, the peninsula with no land borders with Russia is completely different.
The toll that led to the fiscal victory was devastating – it led to Western sanctions, hampered Russia’s economic growth, significantly affected the lives of average Russians, and contributed to the crisis of the once-famous space industry.
The Kremlin spent $ 1 billion on infrastructure projects in Crimea, such as the $ 3.7 billion bridge that connects the mainland to Russia.
He threw a splash of money at new highways and hospitals, power plants, transportation lines and subsidies that are growing faster than 2.5 billion people.
After the addition, Moscow’s Western sanctions cost Russian corporations more than $ 100,000 billion, or about 4.2 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP), according to a study by former U.S. State Department economists Daniel Ahn and Rodney Ludema.
Putin’s efforts to protect corporations, most of which are controlled by his former colleagues and neighbors, add to losses of up to 8% of GDP, a study published in the November European Economic Review said.
“Eight percent is not a thing to do on Sundays. That’s a big number,” Ahn told reporters in December.
Other analysts, however, dismiss the figure.
“Direct losses are small,” Ukrainian analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera. He said the sanctions had led to a loss of only one percent of Russia’s GDP.
However, Russia’s bilateral trade with Ukraine disappeared from a nearly $ 50 billion peak in 2011 and annual losses are at least $ 20 billion, he said.
With a population of 43 million, the second largest population in the Soviet Republic, Ukraine was Russia’s main trading partner and a source of migrant labor, food products, steel, and high-tech products.
Dozens of Ukrainian factories and research facilities that worked for Russia’s military and space industrial complex severed ties overnight, inflating the cost of new weapons and spacecraft.
One expert said that Western sanctions banned advanced technological exports over the annexation.
“They severely slowed the development of Russia’s space program,” Pavel Luzin, a Russian analyst at the Jamestown Foundation, told Al Jazeera in Washington DC.
Meat on the water
Many in Crimea opted for annexation as Moscow promised to increase salaries and pensions, build better roads and boost tourism.
But nowadays, prices are rising, corruption and the spiraling pressure on any kind of disagreement makes them wonder why they voted for Russia to “unite” in a “referendum” that was not recognized in Ukraine or internationally in March 2014.
“To make people less upset, [Moscow] he has to spend colossal amounts to solve their problems, ”Nikolay Poritsky, a former minister of housing and community services in Crimea, Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.
Life in Russia became complicated.
A butcher living outside the Crimean capital, Simferopol, said it had lost access to Ukrainian meat products after the annexation, and it took months to find a reliable supplier in southern Russia.
After the first purchase, the supplier tried to sell low-quality frozen meat.
“He said,‘ You live far away and maybe you won’t come back again, and I need to feed my family, ’” the butcher told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
Now he only opens his shop once a week to sell chicken because demand is too low.
There is another disaster waiting for those in Crimea, at home.
Crimea is best known for its southern coast because it is a subtropical postcard full of common hotels, resorts and traditional communist leaders and green land filled with Russian rubble.
Most of the peninsula, however, is arid and the mountains are arid.
The Soviet-built North Crimean canal supplied 85 percent of the water, allowing agriculture and population growth to be irrigated from the powerful Dnieper River.
Ukraine closed the canal in 2014, almost erasing forcing agriculture in Crimea and the de facto authorities to facilitate water supply in urban areas.
Today, Simferopol, the second largest city on the Crimean peninsula, receives water three hours a day on weekdays and five hours on weekends. Neighbors who build apartments go to fill their bathrooms.
Water pumped from nearly depleted reservoirs and polluted wells is sometimes dirty.
“I once filled a bath, and the water was the color of brandy,” Edem Kurtveliyev, a medical doctor living in a nine-story apartment building in southern Simferopol, told Al Jazeera.
De facto authorities announced multi-million dollar projects to pump water from aquifers, but admit that the only long-term solution to the water crisis is expensive desalination plants.
“De-salting is the only solution,” Russian Crimean leader Sergey Azioniov told RIA Novosti news agency in December.
Four months later, Ukraine’s refusal to reopen the canal was compared to “state terrorism” and “genocide”.
[ad_2]
Source link
