In mid-February, occupiers-controlledmedia disseminated an “optimistic” story about the production in the Crimea of welding machines “for the construction of nuclear icebreakers of Project 22220 “Arctic”” at a plant that allegedly “created a unique automatic welding complex “Voskhod”, which was used in the construction of the Crimean bridge”. The name of the plant is not indicated, but according to the data of the mentioned “general director” Georgy Agadzhanyan, it is easy to establish that we are talking about such Simferopol “full-cycle enterprise” as the “SELMA Electrical Machine-Building Plant”, with a store on Kecskemetska Street and industrial facilities in the workshops of the industrial zone on Generala Vasilyeva Street.
It is noteworthy that SELMA was controlled by Russian beneficiaries, namely the “Research and production company “Engineering and Technological Service” (“ITS”), which managed a similar structure “ESVA” in Kaliningrad; before Agadzhanyan, the Simferopol “SELMA” was headed by a “veteran of the Soviet fleet”, including the landing ship “Ivan Rogov”, Alexander Kreuz.
Since 1991, “ITS” itself has been servicing all shipbuilding military plants of the aggressor with welding equipment, including “Sevmash”, “Zvezdochka”, “Baltic Plant” and so on, as well as “Gazprom” and “Transneft”. At the same time, it is not surprising that “SELMA” is constantly under the “tutelage” of such a structure associated with the aggressor’s special services as the “Southern regional export support center” and in 2020 it laundered 5 million rubles of “support” from the “ministry of industry” of the occupiers.
The companies of the “ITS” group are associated with such businessmen from St. Petersburg as Sergey Isakov, Mikhail Karasev, Dmitry Rabotinsky and Anastasia Simonova, while sanctions on this “welding empire” have currently been imposed only by Ukraine: on two of its subsidiaries in the Russian Federation, “ITS-Engineering” and “ITS-Moscow”, as well as the branch in Kazakhstan “ITS-Astana”; it is obvious that this sanctions impact needs to be strengthened.
