State of emergency in Crimea after power lines blown up

Ukraine has ramped up pressure on Russian Federation by banning goods deliveries to Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Moscow a year ago, and by failing to restore power after electricity pylons were blown up. Video proven by the ATR network, a Tatar tv station now operating in Ukraine after its main channel in Crimea was forced to close, showed Tatar activists tackling the special Ukrainian cops officers units making an attempt to accomplish access for fix crews.

It is still not clear exactly how the pylons were damaged in Kherson, a Ukrainian region adjacent to Crimea.

Almost two million people on the Crimean Peninsula are without electricity after two transmission towers in Ukraine were damaged by explosions, Russia’s energy ministry says.

Just who carried out the attack, now the subject of a police investigation, remains unclear but suspicion has fallen on Tartar activists.

Moscow’s energy ministry said that some 938,000 residents of Crimea remained without electricity and Russian Federation was sending 300 mobile generators to the peninsula.

In September, Tatar activists opposed to Russia’s annexation of their indigenous homeland set up road blocks on roads leading from Ukraine to Crimea as part of an economic blockade aimed at dramatising the plight of Tatars in Crimea. He was unlikely to take kindly to Ukraine disrupting life for all of Crimea, however, given that he has made its absorption into Russian Federation something of a personal project.

Crimean Tatar activists suggested that the weakened pylons were blown down by the wind. The rest will run on diesel generators. Sergei Aksyonov, the Kremlin-backed head of Crimea, declared Monday a non-working day because of the emergency situation.

““Emergency mode was introduced in Crimea in connection with the complete halt of electricity supply to Crimea from Ukraine”, Vladimir Ivanov said.

According to the Ukrainian statistics, in the first half of 2015, Ukraine exported 472.1 million US dollars worth of products to Crimea, while the value of its imports from the peninsula stood at 18.1 million dollars.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine provoked the worst crisis in relations between Russian Federation and the West since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, with the West imposing economic sanctions.

Russia’s Interfax news agency reported on Monday that three people had been detained in Moscow for hanging a blue and yellow Ukrainian flag on the facade of a Stalin-era skyscraper.

Earlier, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak stated that the power bridge to supply electricity to the Crimea from the Russian Federation would be built in the very near future.