Just the other day, we wrote about the “resounding success” of the latest “Yalta International Forum” in Moscow, where the aging spy Georgy Muradov served as the permanent talking head for the Russian intelligence services, and the “key political star” was “Crimean speaker” Vladimir Konstantinov.
The half-empty hall and the ostentatious lack of attention to the event from even the “second-rate” Kremlin figures, against the backdrop of the subsequent “friendly meeting” between the Kremlin dictator himself and Crimean gauleiter Sergei Aksyonov, which the occupiers’ propaganda trumpeted “from every iron,” served as an illustration of yet another draw of the greasy deck of cards played by Crimean collaborators.
But now we can talk about something else, namely, the Konstantinov clan’s attempts to find fault with the obvious failure of “people’s diplomacy.” Muradov himself was tasked with voicing this, and the “Crimean republican budget” was allegedly blamed.
At a fake “meeting of the state council committees on interethnic relations and on people’s diplomacy and interregional relations,” Muradov declared that funds were insufficient, and that they had been spent en masse on Konstantinov’s “visits” to Venezuela and Pyongyang in 2025.
Among other things, Muradov complained that only 6 million rubles have been allocated for the “celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Kerch Museum,” for which the occupiers are preparing routine propaganda provocations, including the “Scythian gold” theme.
Muradov also stated that for Russian intelligence projects such as the “Black Sea association for international cooperation” and the “International association of friends of Crimea,” he will only be able to “organize video conferences and one in-person meeting per year, but only for 30 people,” the bulk of whose participants are traditionally composed of the collaborators themselves.
Since even the declared “republican budget deficit” for next year already amounts to 4 billion rubles, these complaints are clearly intended to explain in advance the subsequent “breakthrough successes” of the criminal projects described above.
Against this backdrop, Muradov’s “colleague,” Edip Gafarov, stated that “budget funds” for “state national policy,” namely, 126 million, will primarily go to the “officials” themselves, both directly (36.4 million) and through the fake “House of Friendship of Peoples” (41.5 million), another 5 million will be written off to so-called “national societies,” and 42 million will be spent on “media publication,” that is, on propaganda.
The collaborators promised “a whole” 1 million for “compensation for the rehabilitated,” emphasizing that “subsidies to local budgets for co-financing capital investments” through 2028 “are not provided for in the draft budget.”
Gafarov, however, decided not to mention the previous “fat years,” when his “department” and “local budgets” siphoned off these funds for the “construction” or at least “acquisition on the secondary market” of housing for deportees.
From this, the collaborators profited twice: first by “embezzling the funds,” and then by taking bribes from the public for apartments, which could reach up to a third of their value.
Now, the collaborators are left to “cheerfully report” on their steadfast adherence to the Kremlin slogan, “there’s no money, but you hang in there,” which is more relevant than ever for the occupied peninsula.
