At the beginning of October, the occupiers moved another of their puppets from Crimea to Melitopol: the criminal “First deputy minister of resorts and tourism of republic” Igor Kotlyar became there the equally illegal “minister of culture, sports and tourism”. Kotlyar has long been trying to “break into the people” in the field of “pro-Russian activities” and back in 1998 he tried to become a people’s deputy from the “Soyuz” (“Union”) party, having received a “profile education” in Odesa in absentia and a decade later. He also spent a decade, from 1997, as the head of the tourism department of the relevant ministry of the AR of Crimea, and from 2006 he became a deputy minister there – until the beginning of the occupation.
It is noteworthy that Crimean residents associate the current rather non-public “career success” of the Crimean “old-timer” Kotlyar, who has been in the same “position” since the beginning of the occupation of the peninsula and who has always enjoyed the personal favor of the criminal Aksyonov, precisely with the complete collapse of “Crimean tourism” and with the current the role of the “deputy minister” sent to the front-line city as a “switchman”
In this vein, the “change of topics” performed by Kotlyar should be considered symptomatic, back in September 2022 he utopianly promised to “develop cooperation between the beach areas of the Razdolnensky district” at the expense of “residents of the Kherson region”, and in August 2023, together with the “representative of the ministry of defense” of the aggressor telling the population of Shtormove why the beaches are now “banned for visits”.
