Ukrainian government suspends cargo traffic with Crimea

Crimea receives 85% of its water and 80% of its electricity from mainland Ukraine.

Crimean Tatars are an ethnic group native to the peninsula who are against Russian rule.

The Energy Ministry said it was monitoring the energy situation in Crimea around the clock and was organizing supplementary supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar activists began halting commercial lorries on the two roads linking Crimea with the mainland in September, saying they wanted to highlight the mistreatment of Tatars since Russian Federation seized the region.

“I would like to emphasise that Ukraine will respond in similar ways”, he said.

Economic ties between Russia and Ukraine collapsed after a popular uprising in Kiev ousted Kremlin-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych previous year, leading Russia to annex Crimea and support Russian-speaking insurgents in the east. However, still around 1.6 million people were after the “blackout” without power at noon.

Hospitals were also left dependent on generators but in some cases these only provided enough energy to keep operating theatres and intensive care units functioning. On Monday he said fix crews would be allowed access to the damaged towers, but “it is not right to supply electricity to occupied territory where the rights of our citizens are roughly violated”.

The blackout cut cable and mobile internet and forced the closure of some 150 schools.

Unknown assailants presumed to be Ukrainian nationalists knocked out all four of the main electricity lines running through the Kherson region – the first two were severely damaged on Friday and two more by explosions just after midnight on Sunday morning.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea triggered punitive Western sanctions on Moscow, which a diplomat told Reuters on Sunday would stay in place until at least July 2016.

A “temporary banning (of) cargo traffic on the administrative border” between Ukraine and Crimea was ordered Monday by Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. “Russia delivers coal to the Ukrainian energy sector”.

According to Poroshenko, he submitted a letter on November 4 to the Cabinet of Ministers on immediately establishing a working group to terminate freight transport and trade turnover with Crimea, as well as to work on the elaboration of a respective draft decision.

Crimean Tatar activists accuse Russian Federation of abusing Tatar rights and denying them a voice since a pro-Moscow government was installed in Crimea.

But there is still no land link between Russian Federation and Crimea, and Ukraine supplies about 70 percent of the peninsula’s electricity.