We have previously written repeatedly about the scam involving the “sale” of the “Yalta sea port” by the occupiers in 2025, with a “friendly discount” to the Moscow firm “Chernomorskoye Razvitie.”
The aggressor’s propaganda made no secret of the fact that this structure is controlled by the Kremlin oligarch Arkady Rotenberg, who is also implicated in the “creation of a yacht marina” in Balaklava, embezzling billions of “budget” funds.
It is also openly stated that a casino will be built on the Yalta lands seized by Rotenberg, a project previously relocated by the occupiers to the city center from the Yalta village of Katsiveli.
After the Rotenbergs’ structures fenced off the port complex on Roosevelt Street in April and began demolition work, a number of the aggressor’s “talking heads,” like Alexander Khodakovsky and a number of Crimean collaborators, suddenly “awoke” and began raising questions like “who’s going to gamble under drones?” and declaring that casinos in Crimea are now a matter of “raking in the budget under a plausible pretext.”
Meanwhile, in the classic “good tsar and bad boyars” narrative, the blame for future “emptied pockets, debt traps, broken families, and suicides” falls not on the Kremlin itself, which handed over the “juicy jackpot” to the Rotenbergs, but on “State duma deputies from Crimea,” who allegedly “signed off on the initiative without even looking.”
Against this backdrop, Crimean gauleiter Sergei Aksyonov decided to hold a “model meeting” with “investor representatives” on April 17, the gist of which boiled down to the fact that the casino project was being “implemented on the orders” of the Kremlin dictator himself.
The described “rebellion on the knees,” which Aksyonov now decided to “nip in the bud” with references to the “supreme snow crane,” naturally has nothing to do with the interests of Crimeans. Its roots lie in the struggle between Kremlin factions for control over “too limited” lands and development in central Yalta.
As a reminder, by early 2026, the aggressor’s punitive forces, clearly not on their own initiative, began to “thicken the clouds” around “Yalta officials,” sending several individuals from the entourage of city “mayor” Yanina Pavlenko, a protégé of the Kremlin’s Kovalchuk clan, to the basement. We wrote that Pavlenko herself is now set to be “evacuated” to the operetta chair of a “Duma deputy,” and therefore the sudden statements about “overlooked deputies” on whom less than nothing in Crimea actually depends are also not accidental.
Thus, it is clear that another “no-holds-barred fight” will begin in the Kremlin corridors this year for the seat of the next Yalta gauleiter, through whose signatures the Rotenbergs will further siphon off billions “for the casino.”
