At the end of October, the occupiers’ “Crimean” propaganda was full of statements about the next “fateful meetings” of the fake “committees of the state council” with its “newly elected members”. However, the corresponding “notes of optimism” predictably turned out to be dissonant even within the “deputy corps”.
For example, at the “specialized committee”, the fake “new minister of agriculture” Denis Kratyuk decided to “delight” with promises of increasing by 2030 “the volume of agricultural production by 25%”, “due to an increase in the gross harvest” of grain, oilseeds, fruits and berries.
At the same time, the reasons for the growth were stated to be a certain “rise of virgin lands” in the Soviet manuals familiar to collaborators, namely “the introduction of 125 thousand hectares of unused agricultural land into production”. However, in this “stream of optimism” it remains to clarify “the smallest thing”, namely – where is it planned to get irrigation water for this in a region that is arid by definition.
This promise is clearly at odds with the statements in the “neighboring” “committee on ecology and natural resources”, where it is not only stated that the total volume of filling of reservoirs of natural flow in Crimea “is 120 million cubic meters, or 47% of the full design volume”.
At the same time, not only is the discharge of water from the Belogorsk and Taigan reservoirs into the North Crimean Canal acknowledged, but “work on the Nezhinsky and Prostornensky water intakes to supply underground water to the North Crimean Canal to fill the Eastern Crimean reservoirs”, which allegedly amounted to 36.6 million cubic meters.
At the same time, it was stated that in 2024, “the area of irrigation of agricultural crops in the republic amounted to 20.3 thousand hectares of irrigated land, and the volume of water supplied for irrigation was 20.4 million cubic meters.”
Thus, if the occupiers generally have enough local water for the current model of management, then for another hundreds of thousands of hectares they need to sharply increase the predatory extraction of groundwater, which is not only fraught with environmental consequences, but also unrealistic in terms of volumes.
And the occupiers do not have any clear plans in this area, which follows from the statements of the “head of the committee” Svetlana Shabelnikova, which is explained by a simple reason: there are no “federal” billions that were senselessly “buried” by collaborators in water extraction until 2022.
Against this background, statements about “cleaning 20 kilometers of rivers” within the framework of a certain “regional project” “Preservation of unique water bodies”, including Salgir with its tributaries and Slavyanka, sounded tragicomic. Let us recall, that it was these watercourses that became sources not so much of water as of news about their constant pollution, without identifying the real culprits of the discharges.
Here it is especially worth citing the “careless confessions” of the illegal “head of the fisheries department” from the same “minister” Kratyuk, a collaborator of Vladimir Gaidaenko.
According to him, after carrying out similar “events to clear the Belbek River bed” in November 2021, the habitats of freshwater crabs were partially destroyed, the animals’ burrows were covered with a large number of boulders and rubble.
Gaidaenko’s “sudden sincerity” regarding the extreme decline in the number of freshwater crabs, with the story of “ecocide” from the aggressor’s criminal code, is explained simply: Belbek was “cleaned” not by his “wards”, but by the “authorities” of Sevastopol, “competing” for “development of federal subsidies”.
However, it is obvious that the current “cleaning of rivers” in the AR of Crimea leads to approximately similar consequences, both for flora and fauna, and for hydrology, and consequently – for water supply.
