After the October “Butter Week” – a sharp jump in Crimean prices for dairy products and a few days after our publications on the reduction in the number of Crimean cows, we can observe new “rays of agricultural optimism” performed by a number of collaborators, from gauleiter Sergei Aksyonov to “minister” Kratyuk and “Chairman of the state council committee on agrarian policy and rural development” Vasily Rogatin.
At the next “meeting on milk yields” Aksyonov stated that allegedly livestock farming in Crimea “is showing good results”, allegedly increasing milk production by 15% in 2024.
It is not difficult to understand how this happened with a decrease in livestock and the logistical impossibility of importing Russian raw materials to Crimean dairies: we previously wrote that the share of natural milk in the final “Crimean product” is about a quarter, and there is still enough water in the wells for “an increase in livestock production”.
Collaborators have a little more difficulty with potatoes, it is more difficult to dilute them with something, and therefore the aggressor’s propaganda can only boast of an “unprecedented harvest of the second bread” in 2024 of 70 thousand tons, despite the fact that before the occupation, Crimean farmers annually produced more than 250 thousand tons of potatoes.
This figure is not accidental, since it more than covered the annual needs of the region’s population.
And now the fake “minister of agriculture” Denis Kratyuk can only say that “one of the reasons for the rise in the cost of potatoes is the excess of demand over supply”, that is, a banal shortage. Well, Vasily Rogatin, naturally, blames everything on the “damned Ukrainians”, stating verbatim that supposedly “for many years during the Ukrainian period we did not plant gardens, vineyards, or vegetables”.
Rogatin himself, as a functionary of the Soviet Communist Party, who rose to the rank of second secretary of the Bakhchisarai district committee by 1991, and then held cushy positions for decades in “Krymgaz” and “Chernomorneftegaz”, naturally never planted anything in his life and “hilled” potatoes only with a fork.
Earlier, we wrote about the contrast in the areas of gardens and vineyards before 2014 and after, when for some reason under the “sun of the Russian world” the area of land sharply decreased. Well, Rogatin’s words that vegetables were not planted in Crimea before 2014 are worthy of a separate cabinet of curiosities.
However, the collaborators have a new “magic wand” for agriculture, which they are not shy about demonstrating not only to each other, but also to the Kremlin. Aksyonov and Rogatin promised an increase in production due to the “introduction into circulation of unused agricultural land” in the amount of 170 thousand hectares, including 19 thousand “unclaimed land shares”.
Allegedly, from January 1, all these lands “will automatically become municipal”, after which they promise “complete abundance”. This “new virgin land” is presented in a “political wrapper”, since it is obvious that the “unused lands” have not been “re-registered” since 2014 by persons and structures that did not cooperate with the occupiers: displased persons, mainland owners, and so on.
But this “simple solution” of the aggressor’s accomplices in the style of “take and divide” has a very small nuance: if the “no man’s land” is suitable for farming, then it has been “idle” for the last decade only on the papers of collaborators, but the current “re-registrations” can knock it out of actual circulation for a couple of years.
How this “dramatically increases harvests” can only be guessed at.
