We previously wrote about the occupiers’ spectacular plans to launch “cruise routes” on the Mariupol-Batumi route, using the much-hyped, but unsuitable for Black Sea navigation, river cruise ship “Mustai Karim.”
This “brilliant move” was outlined in the “Strategy for the sustainable development of the Azov Region through 2040,” approved by the aggressor’s government on December 29, and now this document has become the fodder for a massive hysteria in the occupation propaganda.
This refers to the “denials” recently released by the Ukrainian authorities regarding the rather expected and well-founded public assessment of the “Strategy.”
Ukrainian experts assessed the document as a set of goals out of touch with reality for a region experiencing war, sanctions, and the degradation of basic infrastructure, also as a collection of populist projects and dual-use measures, effectively aimed at strengthening the aggressor’s military and logistical potential.
However, “rebuttals” to this were now written by persons, who clearly had no interest in delving into the content of the “Strategy” itself, since the document contains nothing concrete whatsoever regarding its stated objectives of “housing development,” “pollution elimination, land and water resource restoration,” and “expanding health and tourist centers.”
Essentially, the “environmental” and “humanitarian” components of the “Strategy” reduce to constantly shifting blame for the degradation of the Sea of Azov and the coastal zone onto the Ukrainian authorities, while no solutions are offered for the allegedly “key problems,” beyond all sorts of measures to “research and address the issues,” “plans,” and “roadmaps.”
The “Strategy” consistently ignores the situation of the large-scale war in the Azov Region, only stating the “leakage of significant quantities of metals into the soil,” without specifying their origin, and the presence of “construction waste dumps” from “destroyed cities and industrial enterprises,” also with a “modest” omission of who actually did this.
The document also cynically laments the “uncontrolled construction of a large number of tourism industry facilities on individual coastal sites” prior to their occupation by Russia,
forgetting to clarify that, until 2022, this industry ensured the genuine, rather than “planned and directed,” sustainable development of coastal communities.
The “Strategy” also refers to the destruction of the Kakhovka Reservoir dam as a “natural disaster,” along with climate change and soil salinization, and it omits any suggestions about restoring the dam, the reservoir, or the operation of the North Crimean and other canals: clearly, the aggressor clearly has no intention of resolving these issues “before 2040.”
The “Strategy” further identifies the “root of many problems” in the increasing salinity of the Sea of Azov and the Sivash Bay, but the document is completely unclear as to the challenges this poses to ecosystems and the population. Furthermore, the “Strategy” does not provide any measures to counter these phenomena.
From the “specifics” of this document, one can only highlight certain tragicomic details, such as “preparing proposals for the harvesting and processing of jellyfish in the Sea of Azov,” and measures “beneficial” to the salinized and desertified lands of Ukraine’s Azov region, such as “bringing at least 90% of unused arable land back into economic circulation.”
Thus, the “Strategy” is not a program of action for sustainable development,
but purely a propaganda cover for both the “development” of the Azov Region by the occupiers, and the corresponding corruption in projects that are extremely remote from the interests of the region’s population.
