In Crimean social networks there is a heated discussion of the problem of the Crimean homeless, which, as it “suddenly turned out”, had gone to a dead end by the tenth anniversary of the occupation. Previously, we wrote about the “Sevastopol bridgehead” for the marginalized population, but there the demands of the Russian colonialists and collaborators boiled down mainly to the “need to put” the homeless somewhere.
At the same time, the occupiers abolished the registration centers for homeless citizens that existed in the Crimea until 2014, as “not complying” with the aggressor’s 2013 law “On the fundamentals of social services for citizens in Russia”, according to which “care is limited only to conversations, proposals, programs, discussions”. The Russian occupiers predictably promised to “build houses for the homeless, shelters and a point of assistance in Kerch and Simferopol,” but naturally this did not happen over the course of a decade.
In 2015, under the illegal “Ministry of labor and social protection”, the so-called “Simferopol house of help for persons without fixed residence place” was announced, the permanent “director” of which, Konstantin Babak, stated in 2021 that no shelter had been built and the discussion had been going on for seven years only “about the allocation of a site.” However, through the “house of the homeless”, funds are naturally laundered annually, but are written off for “self-service of a government institution”.
The current surge of attention to the problem was caused by an attempt by “Kerch volunteers” to talk about the “assistance provided to the homeless” in the form of organizing “hot food on Saturdays in the area of the former market”. However, since such assistance does not fit into the aggressors’ current militaristic frenzy, Crimean residents noted on social networks that “it’s as if after such messages these people were left without food at all. Now the “inspectors” will come and find a thousand violations in the menu” and that “you shouldn’t they wrote… the overseers will come running and there will be new additions to the number of hungry Kerch residents”.
