Moscow urges Kyiv to restore power supply to Crimea
Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev said the protesters would only let engineers fix two pylons that serve areas of mainland Ukraine – not the two linked to Crimea.
Though Russia is preparing undersea cables to deliver power to the Crimean peninsula, Ukraine still provides Crimea with its electricity.
The Russian parliament voted overwhelmingly in March 2014 to annex the largely Russian-speaking Crimea, just weeks after pro-Western Ukrainian protests in Kyiv forced Russia-leaning President Viktor Yanukovych from office.
A senator representing the peninsula in Russia’s Federation Council told RIA Novosti on Monday that retaliatory measures, including halting coal exports to Ukraine, “could not be ruled out”.
The pylons were first attacked on Friday, with explosions downing two lines and damaging two others in Ukraine’s Kherson region.
It is unclear who was responsible for the outage, but Crimean Prime Minister Sergei Aksyonov called it an “act of terrorism” and implied Ukrainian nationalists were to blame, according to Reuters.
Russia’s Novak said it seemed “strange” that Ukraine’s authorities can’t manage some “extremists” preventing the restoration of power.
Yuri Kasich, a deputy head of Ukrainian state-run energy company Ukrenergo, said Sunday night that Ukraine’s maintenance crews were ready to restore electricity supply to Crimea within four days if they are granted access to the site where the damaged power lines are located.
The energy ministry in Moscow said that some 938,000 residents of Crimea remained without electricity and Russian Federation was sending 300 mobile generators to the peninsula.
Russia’s Black Sea fleet, which has its headquarters at Sevastopol, announced that it was unaffected by the power failure. Earlier in November, Russia declared it would ban all food imports from Ukraine at of the start of the New Year, after Kyiv agreed to join the European Union and the U.S.in sanctions against Moscow.
In September, Tatar and other activists tried to blockade the main road leading from Crimea to Ukraine, disrupting food supplies. Crimea was part of Russia for more than 150 years until 1954 and 58% of Crimeans are ethnic Russians. Russia’s been planning several projects to increase electrical generation in Crimea as a way of making it less vulnerable to disruptions of power from Ukraine.
Crimean Tatar activists accuse Russian Federation of abusing Tatar rights and denying them a voice since a pro-Moscow government was installed in Crimea.
Open all references in tabs: [1 – 5]