Ukraine Says Will Restore Power to Crimea
“Kyiv’s actions against Crimea are an attempt to raise the temperature of the conflict with Russian Federation and return the West’s attention to Ukraine, without which the regime will fall”, said Alexei Pushkov, head of the worldwide affairs committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament, according to the official RIA news agency.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn told euronews with the region is now at risk of falling into crisis work must be quickly done to restore power. Russian-annexed Crimea has been cut off from Ukrainian electricity supplies as a result of the damage.
It is still not clear exactly how the pylons were damaged in Kherson, a Ukrainian region adjacent to Crimea.
The government’s decision Monday heightens tensions with Russian Federation, which annexed Crimea a year ago and is supporting pro-Moscow separatists in Ukraine’s east. Two police officers were attacked by demonstrators near the site and a fix crew was thwarted by the demonstrators pushing for an economic blockade, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry in Kyiv said Sunday.
The government in Crimea imposed rolling blackouts on most residential neighborhoods and announced that it had enough fuel on hand for emergency generators to keep them running for a month. “There can’t be a free economic zone in territories where bandits rule and where human rights are rudely violated”, Mustafa Jemilev, a Ukrainian lawmaker and Crimean Tatar leader, said at a government meeting Monday.
A Ukrainian lawmaker close to the circle of Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said of the Crimea blackout: “This was all done with the tacit consent of the country’s whole leadership”.
“Crimea is a territory of Ukraine“.
But there is still no land link between Russian Federation and Crimea, and Ukraine supplies about 70 percent of the peninsula’s electricity.
Russia’s Energy Ministry said that by Sunday afternoon electricity supplies had been restored to more than a quarter of the population, largely in the major cities, through the use of mobile gas turbine generators.
Kyiv confirmed the destruction of the power lines’ towers, but the identity of the attackers is not known.
Protesters – including Crimean Tatars – are preventing repairs to the pylons.
Sergei V. Aksyonov, the Kremlin-appointed prime minister of the Crimean Republic, was more exercised, calling the power cutoff “a terrorist act” in a statement on Monday.
Russia plans to replace the electricity supply from Ukraine with power lines coming from the Russian mainland, but those are not yet complete.
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