On December 5, Crimean gauleiter Sergei Aksyonov announced the arrival of an “Abkhazian delegation” to the occupied peninsula, led by the “whole” “deputy prime minister and minister of finance of the republic,” Jansuh Nanba, who also arranged a photo shoot with the infamous Georgiy Muradov, during which he talked about “supplies of citrus fruits, soft drinks, and water to Crimea.”
This “deputy prime minister”, “appointed” in April had previously served as the “head of the presidential administration” under Aslan Bzhania, who was violently removed in 2025 by another Kremlin puppet, his former “deputy,” Badra Gumba.
The intricacies of “Abkhazian politics” would take too long to recount. It’s enough to note that Nanba is a “second-ranking” figure in Sukhumi, while a compromise figure for a number of clans.
However, Nanba’s Crimean voyage is notable not so much for its tales of tangerines and mineral water, as for the preceding events.
The day before, Abkhazian “media” began vigorously disseminating a series of interviews and statements by Sergey Kiriyenko, a once powerful Kremlin apparatchik who claimed, among other things, control over “personnel policy” in all of Ukraine’s occupied territories.
However, as numerous “leaks from Russian channels” claim, since 2024, “Kiriyenko’s star” has faded somewhat, and, among other things, he allegedly failed to protect a number of his protégés from prison as part of the Kremlin’s inter-clan struggle.
The constant rat race behind the Kremlin’s doors is a murky and thankless matter to analyze, but it is more or less certain that Kiriyenko has now been appointed “responsible for Abkhazia,” where he has begun a flurry of activity, including self-promotion, with organizing the filming of two Russian “consolidation” series.
But in his personal capacity as a “talk show host,” Kiriyenko recently distinguished himself not only by declaring that “the sea in Abkhazia smells better” than in Crimea or Sochi, but also by making a rather blunt statement that “Abkhazia now has a unique window of opportunity. Because while the war is going on, Crimea is restricted for obvious reasons. There are restrictions in the Krasnodar Territory. Plus, there are fuel oil and environmental problems in Anapa.”
Clearly, such a statement, which “goes against the grain” of the aggressor’s “Crimean” propaganda manuals about the “steady growth of tourists and other prosperity,” and of the systemic silence about the consequences of the “Volgoneft” tanker disaster in the Black Sea, which, incidentally, also affected Abkhazia, is not made out of some “love of the truth” by Sukhumi native Kiriyenko.
This smacks of a certain media play inherent in Kremlin apparatchiks, and as a “counter-move,” the aforementioned essentially pointless trip to Simferopol by Jansuh Nanba is quite understandable.
It’s clear that the Abkhazian bigwigs are well aware that Kiriyenko is simply playing their own game with them, and they have no intention of sharing their risks with this courtier, so they hastily put their “eggs into baskets” and dispatched their “guest of honor” Nanba to Simferopol, to Kiriyenko’s “most bitter friends” with talk of “friendship and mineral water.”
How the current “Sukhumi scheme” will end for Kiriyenko, and whether the occupied peninsula will continue to figure in it, remains to be seen.
