As “specialists of the Azov-Black Sea branch of the All-Russian research institute of fisheries and oceanography” cynically stated on October 6, allegedly “in the spring of 2023, 350 tons of kalkan flounder were produced in the Sea of Azov, which is 80 tons more than the production of this type of kalkan in the Black Sea and the highest rate in the last 20 years”.
Let us note that this “increase in production” of flounder has, among other things, a prosaic reason: the occupation by the aggressor of not only Crimea, but also the Azov regions of mainland Ukraine, the population of which has now lost fishing opportunities and “does not compete” with “fishing enterprises” controlled by the aggressor. At the same time, the fishermen of the occupied Crimea, unlike the Russian ones, pay additional corruption fees not only to the criminal “officials of the Federal Fisheries Agency” but also to the aggressor’s “border guards” of the for the very opportunity to go to sea.
Let us recall that even before the start of large-scale aggression, the occupiers carried out provocations against Ukrainian fishermen, which our Association repeatedly covered both in publications about the fish mafia and in covering the administrative process regarding the former activities of the Ukrainian-Russian Fisheries Commission in the Sea of Azov.
Let us add that the occupiers themselves explain the “increase in catches” by the increase in salinity of the Azov Sea, the main reason for which experts called the closure of the North Crimean Canal in 2014, that is, the very event regarding which Crimean collaborators are now fabricating fake “processes”.
