While the Crimean fake “film studios” and “film festivals” are constantly “thrown” by the aggressor’s propaganda for the uncritical “attention” of readers, the real business in this area, as everybody know, “loves silence”.
And while the majority of cinemas in the occupied Crimea eke out a miserable existence, some objects of this illegal business feel “quite tolerably” and remain “a tasty morsel” for the occupying criminal “officials”.
First of all, we are talking about the Yalta cinema “Saturn IMAX”, which is allegedly attributed in social networks and in the occupiers’ statements to “the business of Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Maxim Burbak”.
Until 2014, it was, in fact, the only cinema in the Crimea with licensed Canadian IMAX equipment, the company worked on a Canadian franchise. In February 2014, as part of the criminal preparations for the occupation of the peninsula, the aggressor’s propaganda even staged a “cinema picket”, allegedly “against the Ukrainian owners”.
In 2019, “Krym.Realii” published an investigation stating that the interaction of “Triumph Media Group” and “Planet Kino” with Yalta continued at least until 2016, and that as of 2019, the cinema continued to show European and American films in IMAX format to an opaque scheme.
Further, the Security Service of Ukraine stated that it took into account the materials of the journalistic investigation in its activities, but there were no reports of criminal proceedings and suspicions on this issue. In 2021, we wrote that the plans of the criminal “administration” of Yalta that included the expansion of the cinema with the creation of a kind of “shopping and entertainment center”, and in the same year, “40 million profit” was announced, which “Saturn IMAX” allegedly received.
A number of investigations were also carried out about the fate of such a “shopping and entertainment center” “South Gallery” in the occupied Simferopol, about its connections with the fishery mafia and the interests of both the criminal “head of Crimea” Aksenov and the Estonian magnate Hillar Teder.
Now the occupational propaganda reports that allegedly “a decision was made on external management” for the “Saturn IMAX” cinema as part of a new criminal wave of “nationalization of Ukrainian assets in the Crimea”, launched in 2022.
The development of this story will be monitored by our Association.
