On September 1, Crimean gauleiter Sergei Aksyonov reported that allegedly “the tourist flow to Crimea in January-August of this year exceeded 5.3 million people”, which is allegedly “16% more than in 2024”, of which allegedly 3.77 million came over the summer.
We have already written many times that these figures and the statements that “61% of vacationers arrived in the republic via the Crimean Bridge by car and bus, 23% by rail, 16%” via the occupied mainland are impossible to verify, and the occupiers automatically consider all those who arrived on the peninsula to be “tourists”.
At the same time, as we wrote earlier, the Crimean “authorities” are unable to indicate, with a spread of literally a thousand, how many hotels actually operate on the peninsula, but at the same time they operate with the number of “tourists” literally “up to a person”, with a simple calculation: it is quite difficult to documentarily refute these fakes without access to a number of “economic indicators” closed from the public by the aggressor.
However, in early September, the occupiers made public a rather remarkable figure that can say a lot. The illegal “main department of the ministry of emergency situations” stated that in the AR of Crimea “since the beginning of the year, 17 people have died on water bodies, including one child”, and that a total of 27 incidents have occurred on the water.
At the same time, the emphasis is placed on the fact that most of the victims are local residents, and we will add that the “rescuers” have not added drowned people in the melioration systems of the peninsula to the specified statistics during all the years of occupation, since “there is a different jurisdiction there”.
Of course, every death on the water can be both absurd and tragic, but the general statistics of drowned people per two million people is quite important, until, of course, the occupiers decided to hide it. And it’s not even about the fact that among the “5.3 million tourists” there were fewer drowned people than among the 1.9 million Crimean residents themselves.
What’s important are the previous figures, announced by the same “rescuers” at the end of the “summer season” a year, two years ago, and so on. At the beginning of September 2024, rescuers spoke of 25 drowned people, in September 2023 – of 29 drowned people, a similar figure was for 2022.
Before the full-scale aggression, this figure was higher, for example, for 2020 for the same period it was 54 drowned people, and for 2019 – 63, the occupiers then counted 73 and 86 incidents on the water, respectively.
As can be understood from these figures, the connection between the number of people who reached the Crimean beach and the number of people who drowned there is the most direct, and therefore in 2025 there were clearly no more “tourists” on the peninsula than a year ago and at the same time about three times less than in the “pre-war” 2020.
It is extremely likely that after this elementary arithmetic of ours with elements of diving, the occupiers will stop publishing statistics on Crimean drowned people, but it is unlikely to add real “tourists” to them.
