On December 26, the occupiers announced that they would begin another “restoration work,” this time in the Church of John the Baptist in Kerch, built in the 8th century. It is stated that the temple was damaged as a result of the rains of 2021, and that the illegal “state construction examination” “approved the project of strengthening the load-bearing structures and foundation, installation of a drainage system.” At the same time, it was stated that “the boundaries of the church are going to be expanded, and a utility building will appear not far from it” with obvious beneficiaries.
It is obvious that the temple, which has survived a thousand years of Crimean history, with such “turbulent plans” from the reenactors, has a real chance of not surviving until next Christmas. As for the damage from the flood itself, we wrote two years ago about the causes of the August flood, 2021 when the occupiers did not clean the bed of the Kerch river and tore down a number of dams in the suburbs during the construction of illegal “Tavrida” highway . The two pits, dug near it by the occupiers, and the four-story cafe of local collaborators, “Cappuccino,” which grew up next door, also did not contributed to the normal condition of the church. It is noteworthy that the occupiers declared the illegal “state autonomous institution” “Directorate for centralized maintenance and development of cultural institutions,” headed by Maxim Soroka, to be the “developer,” or rather the gravedigger, for this temple.
This figure, who found himself in the “director’s chair” in 2023, was previously in the role of the unlawful “head of the department of construction control and technical supervision for restoration projects” of the same “Directorate” and was responsible for “tightly closed eyes” for “technical supervision” of the destruction of the Khan’s Palace . Let us note that only in 2023, during the continuation of the “reconstruction” of the palace, the “Directorate” received into its bottomless bins under “contracts” dated March 24 for about a billion rubles; on the same day it began to appropriate 272 million allegedly for “repairs of the building of the Romanov women’s gymnasium” in the same Kerch, without any result, observable “in nature”.
Regarding the Kerch temple, the “designer” of this scam, the Moscow “PF-Grado” Natalia Bokova, will help “convey a couple of billions to the right pocket” of the “Directorate”, and the matter here will clearly not be limited to last year’s 2.5 million, with which the scam with the temple began. Previously, the occupiers laundered funds through “PF-Grado” for the “restoration” of the Simferopol “government residential building”, and the director of this “designer”, Maxim Konoshenko, also heads another firm, “ResArt”, through which Crimean collaborators laundered 27 million in similar scams, in mostly in “small portions”. In this context, it is noteworthy that the corresponding Moscow company has a “namesake” in Almaty, with the same profile of activities, with director Arkinzhan Mametov and with carefully hidden beneficiaries.
