There was a power cut in Crimea yesterday evening. The windows of houses went dark in Yalta, Dzhankoi, Alushta, and other towns and villages. The Crimean government immediately declared that it was an act of sabotage by Ukraine. Then politicians began accusing Ukraine of limiting the supply of electricity and promised that Russia would take retaliatory measures. Later, Krymenergo – the energy company responsible for the distribution of electricity in Crimea – apologised for a failure in its high-tension lines and promised that the failure would be repaired by morning.
Today, after a candlelit Sunday evening, the inhabitants of Crimea were comforted by some good news: from 24 March, the Russian rouble will begin circulation in the peninsula. Several containers of currency have already arrived, and soon a torrent of Russian money will flow into the pockets of Crimeans. The Ukrainian currency, the hryvna, has not yet been banned, however. In fact, it has been announced that the hryvna will remain in circulation until the beginning of 2016! In other words, Crimeans will need to brush up on their arithmetic, even if the prices of goods and services will now be displayed in both currencies. Nevertheless, from today, all state employees will be paid only in roubles, and company taxes will be collected in roubles too, which might cause quite a few unusual problems.
There is great confusion among businessmen in Crimea now. One is closing companies and shops because he used to receive all his supplies from Ukraine and send finished goods to the mainland. Another is asking the Russian government to exempt Crimean companies from tax. Representatives of the Russian government, tasked by President Putin with organising Russian territorial administration services in the peninsula, have explained that, if they wish to continue their activities, entrepreneurs must first of all register their companies in compliance with Russian law; once that formality is completed, they will be able to start work again.
The Crimean government is not letting up in its propaganda campaign. It has already raised the spirits of pro-Russian retired people by announcing that Russian pensions would be four times higher than Ukrainian pensions. The retired people believe this, and expect it to be true. Some of them think they are going to receive two pensions at once: a Russian pension and a Ukrainian pension. Yet for the moment, no one has received their Ukrainian pension for March. And in this instance, the Ukrainian government is not to blame. The Crimean authorities blocked bank accounts of the Ukrainian treasury into which Kiev has to put the budgeted money. So, for now, no more payments from the Ukrainian state are reaching Crimea.
If you watch Russian television, though, you would never guess the people of Crimea are concerned by this fact. On the contrary, the Russian TV channels continue to show citizens delirious with happiness at their return to Russian protection. Recently, an old Crimean woman interviewed on television declared excitedly: ‘Now Russia is going to send us entire convoys of holidaymakers!’ The term ‘convoys’, back in Stalin’s time, referred to the livestock trains that used to take prisoners to the Gulag. The fact that this grandma thinks Putin is going to order Russian citizens to be piled up in train carriages and sent by force on their holidays reveals the mentality of many elderly Russian-speaking inhabitants of the peninsula.
In Crimea, in spite of the cult of tsarist Russia, the memory of the USSR remains strong, and the Communists are still influential. Most of the Communist Party’s votes in legislative elections in Ukraine come from Crimea. Now that the peninsula’s Communists are going to join the Russian Communist Party, the Ukrainian Communist Party is facing a bleak future. And what of the next tourist season in Crimea, given that the tourism industry is the peninsula’s main source of income? That is an important question. For now, Russian travel agencies say the sale of plane tickets to Simferopol has fallen by 50 per cent since last year.
But the future for Crimea’s grandmothers is not yet the future of Crimea itself. Representatives of the Russian government have given the peninsula’s inhabitants one month to decide which country they want to be citizens of. Registration for Russian citizenship has been open for a long time. But for those who wish to remain citizens of Ukraine, the Crimean authorities are promising a multitude of problems. It has already been announced that it will be impossible to live simply in Crimea with a Ukrainian passport. Those who refuse to surrender to this logic will be forced either to leave or to carry out the formalities necessary to obtain a temporary visa in compliance with current Russian laws. Russian legislation permits dual nationality, but Ukrainian legislation does not. Many Russian-speaking citizens of Crimea want to obtain a Russian passport, but have no intention of renouncing Ukrainian nationality. And I am not only talking about those people who want to receive two different pensions at the same time. There are also people who have family in continental Ukraine or who wish to continue doing business with the mainland. They are aware that relations between the two countries are unlikely to be very friendly from now on. So they want to keep their Ukrainian passport to make it easier for them to travel in Ukraine, while their Russian passport will spare them a vast array of problems in occupied Crimea.
In Kiev, at the end of last week, Parliament adopted at first reading the law ‘guaranteeing the rights and liberties of citizens in temporarily occupied Ukrainian territory’, which governs relations between Ukraine and Crimea. According to this bill, a trip to Crimea not approved by the Ukrainian authorities could lead to three to five years in prison for a Ukrainian citizen, and collaboration with the Crimean authorities up to fifteen years. There is a whiff of Soviet-style Cold War in the air. I wonder who will provide official approval for travel in Crimea? The prime minister? The Ministry of Internal Affairs? Will I be able to obtain this approval online, the way I can get a temporary visa for Singapore, for example, or will I have to take all the required documents and queue for hours in some obscure office, then – as during the Soviet era – have to wait three months for the decision of a special committee? The surrealism that reigns now in Crimea is creating surrealism in Ukraine.
All the same, life in Kiev has more or less gone back to normal. As well as the weather forecasts, Kievites are also carefully following the news each morning on the exchange rates of the dollar and the euro. In spite of promises to open the European market to Ukrainian goods, the hryvna continues to fall. For now, the trend cannot yet be described as catastrophic, but it is certainly not encouraging. Rallies involving pro-Russian forces continue to be held in the south and east of Ukraine, but they are attracting far fewer people. Several major operations by Ukrainian security services – which ended with the arrests of Russian secret service agents in possession of weapons and money intended for separatists – have reassured the east’s inhabitants about the SBU and the police’s determination to genuinely defend the state in Russian-speaking regions. Members of Pravy Sektor and self-defence groups, who took part in the Euromaidan movement, continue to enrol in the National Guard, which is already assisting the border guards in their task in the east and north of the country. The flow of contraband over the Russian–Ukrainian border has suddenly fallen tenfold, and in certain areas has dried up altogether. Many people in border villages are extremely unhappy, as they have lived off this illegal activity for more than twenty years. But it appears that the border will no longer be transparent. An increasing number of politicians are talking of the need to introduce a system of visas with Russia. If Europe does indeed get rid of visas for Ukrainians over the next two years, then the visa system with Russia will become a reality. That will not please the inhabitants of eastern Ukraine, of course, who are used to going to Russia on a regular basis for work. But there can be no return to the old ‘good neighbours’ policy. That is clear. Personally, I am not frightened by the possible introduction of a visa system with Russia. What frightens me is a possible Russian intervention in the east and south of the country. It would be wonderful not to have to think about the possibility of a war, but a day has not passed without that possibility crossing my mind. Even the first stirrings of spring – the earth warmed by the sun, the flowers suddenly blooming – are not enough to distract me from politics. I would dearly love to turn away from it, though. And I am not the only one.