On December 15, the criminal “Crimean speaker” Vladimir Konstantinov announced his proposal to “extend the transition period for the redistribution of certain powers… in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast until 2028,” allegedly announced at a “meeting of the Presidium of the Council of Legislators of Russia” in the State Duma.
Konstantinov’s “demonstrative attention” to the fate of collaborators in the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia Oblast, who are being offered a “three-year installment plan,” occurred against the backdrop of a simmering standoff between the local gauleiter, Yevgeny Balitsky, and his handlers against several Kremlin clans. Meanwhile, since early November, Crimean “media” has rather suddenly decided to talk
about the “Balitsky family’s business octopus,” namely, how the fake “governor of Zaporizhzhia combines power and millions.”
We wrote that the mutual “deep love” between Balitsky and the Crimean gauleiters, primarily Sergei Aksyonov’s group, based on the struggle for profit from commodity and transport flows, the movement of “shadow” finances, drugs and weapons, human trafficking, and illegal transplants in the “gray zone” between the front and Crimea, has long been an open secret.
We then raised the question: would competing groups, in the process of “rocking the Balitskys,” publish more serious stories than the tales about the Melitopol stores? However, the aforementioned “stream of revelations” soon dried up completely.
Let us recall that, since late June, the aggressor-controlled “press” has been reporting on the “new achievements” of Crimean collaborator Daniil Pidaev, declared the illegal “deputy governor of the Zaporizhia Oblast,” after Balitsky managed to “oust” a number of Kremlin protégés from competing factions from the Melitopol “government.”
Pidaev’s identity is extremely vague. According to the “official calendar” of saints issued by the occupiers, this Simferopol native “worked in various positions in the financial supervision service” and the “ministry of construction and architecture” in occupied Crimea. And since the spring of 2021, he has been the “deputy general director” of the illegal “Corporation for the development of the republic of Crimea,” which he “headed” in 2022. Let’s remember that until 2024, Pidaev was involved in scams involving the “Dzhankoy Machine-Building Plant”, which collaborators from the Konstantinov clan are now hastily planning to “nationalize into the right hands.”
Over the past month, “insider channels” have repeatedly written that “Balitsky’s days are numbered,” but then, apparently, “the winds changed,” and a flurry of rumors emerged claiming that the Kremlin has allegedly decided to “keep in place” this Gauleiter “until the end of the war,” which Russia clearly doesn’t plan or expect anytime soon.
Whether Konstantinov’s current demarche, apparently coordinated with his Kremlin handlers, is an attempt to “save major general Balitsky,” will be revealed next year, and against this backdrop, the developments surrounding the ambitions and prospects of the “Kremlin political strategist” Sergei Kiriyenko, who still claims to be the “godfather” of “personnel policy” on the occupied mainland, will be a significant factor.
