A leading Crimean Tatar civic activist on Dec. 1 said a sea blockade of Crimea could be the next step in the campaign against Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula.
If the threat were to be realized, the peninsula would be deprived of supplies from Russia. It would add to a land transport blockade in effect from Ukraine since Sept. 20 and the power outage affecting Crimea since Nov. 21, when unknown activists blew up power pylons in Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, close to the Crimean border.
Lenur Islyamov, coordinator of the road and rail blockade on the spits leading to Crimea from mainland Ukraine, announced the sea blockade in an interview with the website Open Russia, but refused to elaborate.
The fresh threats came as most of the 2 million inhabitants of Crimea were still without regular power supply in the Russian-annexed territory. More than 700 mobile generators were shipped from Russia to help Crimea, but power is still provided only a few hours at a time. It is often interrupted due to excessive demand as winter takes grip. Heating works in only 60 percent of Crimea’s residential buildings.
Visiting Crimea on Dec. 2, Russian President Vladimir Putin said an “energy bridge” that will deliver power from Russia to Crimea across the Kerch Strait via underwater cables was laid. Putin said the bridge would be gradually upgraded to meet Crimea’s 1,100 megawatts of demand.
But that plan may not work.
According to the energy expert Mykhailo Honchar, president of the Kyiv-based Strategy XXI Center, neither Crimea’s easternmost town of Kerch nor the Russian side have the infrastructure able to transmit power to the rest of the peninsula. It could take months or years to build it.
“The energy bridge might be a phantom,” Honchar said. The capacity of the cable is 200 megawatts, but only 34 megawatts were actually added to the grid, topping the total power supply to Crimea at 584 megawatts, Deputy Head of the Russian Ministry of Emergencies Aleksandr Chupriyan said on Dec. 2. Honchar said the figure is exaggerated.
Putin admitted that there might be “disruptions” in the power supply for some time to come.
At the same time, Russia shipped mobile wide-screen television vans to darkened Crimea to keep people informed about developments.
Refat Chubarov, the leader of the executive of the Crimean Tatar national assembly, the Mejlis, told the Kyiv Post that his people didn’t possess any “technical means” to fulfill the sea blockade.
Still, Crimean Tatar leaders say they’ll insist on keeping the lights off.
“When Mustafa Dzhemilev says turn off the electricity, it has to be turned off. When the Mejlis says Crimea has to be returned, then we’ll return it,” said Islyamov.
The 72-year-old Crimean Tatar grandee Dzhemilev, in an interview with the Kyiv Post on Nov. 25 said that “yes, it’s bad without electricity, but prison is worse.” He urged Russia to release Tatar “political prisoners” and to end “political repression on the peninsula.”
Defending the blackout, Dzhemilev claimed that the Tatars in Crimea “are ready to suffer for some time to allow the pressure to take effect.”
Islyamov and his activists control the sites of the destroyed power pylons and insist on the release by Russian authorities of at least Ahmed Chiygoz, a Tatar politician, and Ukrainian volunteer soldier Nadiya Savchenko, in return for lifting their blockade.
Speculation that Russia might strike militarily into southern Kherson Oblast from annexed Crimea and force a restoration of power mainlines are unfounded, Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta Center for Applied Political Studies, told the Kyiv Post. A military response ”would spell a whole new escalation,” and a blunt violation of Minsk peace accords that would sour Kremlin’s relations with the West at a time when Moscow is trying to forge an agreement over Syria, Fesenko said.
The government is, instead, under public pressure to keep the power to Crimea shut off.
“With the blackout it’s as if Ukraine scored against Russia at football,” Fesenko said as he described the widespread public feeling that a response to the Russian takeover of the peninsula was long overdue.
Human rights activist Oleksiy Tolkachov said those who had blown up the power lines had done the work of the authorities. He was among those who said the blackout should have been imposed at the time of Crimea’s annexation in March 2014.
“Then the Donbas would have seen how helpless Russia was,” he told 112 Ukraina channel on Nov. 26, implying the blackout could have cooled pro-Russian sentiment in the east of Ukraine.
Some suggested that the destruction of the power line pylons was convenient for the Ukrainian leadership, allowing it to avoid responsibility for the blackout and thus deflect direct retaliation from Russia, while at the same time squeezing concessions out of the Kremlin.
But Dzhemilev rejected that argument. On the contrary, the authorities were pressing for the power supply to be restored, he said.
One official in favor of restoring the supply is Energy and Coal Industry Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn. He said on Nov. 30 that Russian-separatist forces in Donbas had agreed to resume supplies of coal to Ukraine as soon as at least one of the four destroyed lines was transmitting power. After the lines were repaired, activists refused to let them be reconnected.
Fesenko said that the authorities weren’t using force against the blockade because they didn’t want to risk confrontation with the public.
The blackout increased tensions with those in Crimea favoring Russian rule turning increasingly angry at the Crimean Tatars and causing some Tatars to doubt their cause, Leonid Tselishchev, a 67-year-old resident of Bakhchysaray said. He and his wife have power turned on twice a day for three hours.
Fesenko said a deal on restoring the power supply might be forthcoming.
“Compromise is possible – maybe one line will be opened to ease tensions,” he said.
Staff writer Johannes Wamberg Andersen can be reached at [email protected]
