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Explosions at Ukrainian towers leave Crimea without power

Crimea was left without electricity supplies from Ukraine on Sunday after pylons carrying power lines to the Russia-annexed peninsula were blown up overnight.

The Crimean Emergencies Ministry has declared a state of emergency due to the complete power outage and has put rescue teams on high alert. “Plus mobile gas turbine power plants are working”, he said.

Ilya Kiva, a senior officer in the Ukrainian police who was at the scene, said on his Facebook page that the towers had been “blown up”.

Only essential services and government offices were operating on Monday as pro-Ukrainian activists, many of them ethnic Tatars, prevented Ukrainian engineers from repairing the damaged power lines.

The activists, Tatars themselves, said they had no idea how the pylons had been knocked down. “The operational groups of the main directorate of EMERCOM of Russian Federation in the Republic of Crimea provide practical assistance and monitor the connection of socially important facilities in all the cities and districts of Crimea”, the ministry reported. The initial two were greatly broken on Friday, and the second two were inflated on Sunday right after midnight, the reports stated.

Sergei Aksyonov, the pro-Russian head of Crimea, said electricity supplies might not be properly restored until the first of those cables comes online one month from now. It is suspected that these activists were behind the pylon explosions, but no one has claimed responsibility. Most of the electricity used in Crimea still comes from Ukraine even after Russian Federation annexed it in March 2014.

Ukraine’s state energy company Ukrenergo says the nature of the damage shows that it took place as a result of “shelling or the use of explosive devices”.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s administration will consult with the Tatars on what kinds of goods can be allowed to pass into Crimea, the government said in an emailed statement.

Authorities in Crimea, which is dependent on Ukraine for electricity, said they had managed to partially reconnect the cities of Simferopol, Yalta and Saki using generators after two pylons were brought down.

“Crimea is completely cut off”, Viktor Plakida, the director of Crimea Energy, told Russia’s Tass news agency.

Kyiv has also threatened a tit-for-tat ban on food imports from Russian Federation in a dispute connected to a free trade agreement between Kyiv and the European Union that is set to come into force from January, while the interior minister has suggested cutting off power to Crimea totally.