Earlier, our Association reported that after the occupation of part of the Kherson region by Russian aggressors since March 2022, the supply of Dnipro water to the Crimea has become a key topic of occupiers’ propaganda.
Then it “suddenly” became clear that the occupied peninsula was not ready to supply Dnipro water, that the equipment had been stolen since 2014, and the “municipalities” of Crimea’s rural areas were not able to effectively “regulate” irrigated agriculture.
Further, in October 2022, the Russian occupiers began propaganda preparations for the explosion of the dam of the Kakhovska hydroelectric power plant by the aggressor’s army in order to blame Ukrainian structures for this.
But in this aggressor’s terroristic operation, a “side effect” arose, since even for the “consumers” of Russian propaganda, undermining the dam would mean a decrease in the water level of the Kakhovka Reservoir and, accordingly, the cessation of the operation of the North Crimean Canal.
From this perspective, the statements of Aleksey Gusev, the “head of the profile committee” of the fake “Crimean state council” published in November in the propagandistic occupiers’ “official media” “Krymskiye Izvestiya” are interesting.
Although this collaborator repeatedly declares in the “interview” that “the canal will continue to work”, in fact, the task of “good news” from Gusev was to promise the Crimean residents that “there will be water in Crimea” even after the dam was blown up.
The collaborator focuses on “water saving” and states that in 2022-2023, including “through his hands”, 2.4 billion rubles of “federal funding” will go to “reduce losses in water supply networks”.
At the same time, it is promised to “master” these funds for the repair of “whole:” 170 kilometers of water conduits, while in the city of Simferopol alone the length of water conduits exceeds 1,200 kilometers, and water losses in the Crimean networks are at least 60 %.
It is noteworthy that, referring to the events of 2014-2021, when water was not supplied from the Dnipro river to the Crimea, Gusev “reassuringly” states that then “no one died of hunger and thirst. No one fled from the Crimea.”
It is worth to remind that such belated Gusev’s “confessions” directly contradict the previous aggressor’s rhetoric, which designated “Dnipro water in Crimea” as the alleged “main goal” of aggression against mainland Ukraine.
Les us recall that the aggressor promised fake “trials” on this issue until 2022 and even unsuccessfully and repeatedly fabricated appeals to the European Court of Human Rights. These issues have been carefully studied in the publications of our experts and in the submissions of our Associations in the UN, the OSCE and the Council of Europe.
Now it is obvious that this aggressor-declared “goal” was only a formal pretext for the Kremlin against the background of its criminal intent to genocide the Ukrainian people, and the current statements of the Gusevs exhaustively confirm this.
