The sun has been shining since early this morning. There is a slight wind. The boys are already watering the lawn they sowed yesterday. Liza and Gaby are on their way to us. Today, we will all be together, even if Gaby would rather not be: she always prefers staying in Kiev, without her parents. The morning has been strangely calm. It is already gone eleven, and the cockerels are still crowing.
In Crimea, the pro-Russian self-defence movement seized a wine-making plant in Livadia yesterday. I hope they took something to eat! Meanwhile, Russian officials in charge of the sale of alcoholic drinks are already selling licences for producers of spirits and wines, so that the manufacture and sale of alcohol can comply with Russian regulations and the drinks can be exported to Russia. More than forty licences were sold yesterday, but – according to a representative of Rosalkogol, the federal department governing the alcohol market – there was a much higher number of applicants.
Sergey Aksyonov is in thrall to a new obsession: creating his own Las Vegas, with dozens of casinos and luxury hotel-restaurants. Presumably this is a long-standing dream, as gambling and casinos are banned in Ukraine, even if, of course, there used to be lots of secret casinos, and there are probably quite a few still in existence.
Also yesterday, in Crimea, registration of requests for Russian passports was suspended. No explanation was offered, except that it will be a while before the process of transforming Crimea’s inhabitants into Russian citizens begins again. Perhaps there weren’t enough blank passports, or perhaps officials were simply terrified by the volume of work and are waiting for a detachment of Muscovite civil servants with experience in passports to be parachuted into Crimea. However, it is possible that this pause is connected to Putin’s fears. Yesterday, during a meeting with the Federation Council, the Russian president said that all citizens with non-Russian nationality must declare that fact. In the event that their nationality is not communicated, the offender will be given either an administrative or a criminal punishment. In Ukraine, where dual nationality is prohibited, there is no punishment for holding a second passport. And now various Ukrainian politicians are advising the inhabitants of Crimea who do not wish to give up Ukrainian nationality to tell police they have lost their Ukrainian passport. The idea being that they won’t have to hand it over to Russian authorities when they receive the passport that makes them a Russian citizen.
The Russian Education Minister has prepared a short teaching manual for Russian schools, and it contains a special lesson devoted to ‘the reintegration of Crimea in the Russian Federation’. This manual offers a brief history of Crimea, but says nothing about the Crimean Tatars and their deportation by Stalin. So, once again, the Tatars do not exist as far as Russia is concerned. And not a word about them in the Russian TV reports. Is the Kremlin preparing some new decree declaring their return from deportation illegal?
Russian military manoeuvres are continuing on Ukraine’s borders. In the evening, freight trains brought brand-new Russian T-90 tanks. In a separate delivery, ten 3S-82 mobile propaganda stations arrived at the border. These armoured vehicles with giant megaphones have hardly been used at all since the Second World War. And during that conflict, this type of machine was mostly used by the German army to call upon Soviet soldiers and resistance fighters to surrender. These stations can broadcast messages over almost four miles. They can either play tape-recorded messages or someone can read a text into a microphone with a wire over five hundred yards in length. In other words, the propagandist does not have to be inside the vehicle as they broadcast their message; they could be hiding far away in some bushes, their voice amplified at 1000W, so that if, by chance, a shell were to hit the station, they would remain alive and would not become voiceless. I wonder where the Russian command will find the speakers they need to operate these military propaganda tools. Maybe from Russian television? There is no lack of faithful, pro-Putin patriots, such as presenter Sergey Dorenko, who – during a talk show on the Russian–Ukrainian conflict yesterday – called upon the government to put the Ukrainian leaders and politicians against the wall and open fire on them with machine guns.