From Russia With Love-The New Crimea Bridge

CRIMEA

From Russia with Love

Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin opened a $4-billon bridge linking mainland Russia with the annexed Crimean peninsula in a polished television event typical of the newly re-elected president’s trademark machismo.

With Russian oligarchs in tow, a jeans-clad Putin climbed into a truck cab and revved up the engine while talking to construction workers at the Russian end of the 12-mile-long expanse, the Washington Post reported.

A massive infrastructure project thrice proposed and thrice failed by Putin’s predecessors, the bridge, which finished ahead of schedule, showed that “even the most ambitious plans can be realized when they are implemented by him,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists before the event.

It also showed that Putin is far from done exerting his influence over Ukraine.

Though largely neglected nowadays, fighting continues in Eastern Ukraine against pro-Russian separatist forces and the Ukrainian government.

The conflict began in 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, a move condemned by Kiev and the rest of the West as an illegal land grab under the guise of protecting ethnic Russians.

Hefty sanctions were issued against Russia, a move that affected the livelihoods of Crimea’s some two million residents due to blockades and limited access to mainland Russia, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

The bridge, which can support some 40,000 passenger vehicles per day and 14 million tons of freight per year, will open to commercial traffic in the coming months, making access from Russia easier, wrote AFP.

But it’s bound to also ratchet up tensions between Russia and Ukraine as a symbolic move of the permanence of the annexation, researcher Gabriella Gricius wrote for Global Security Review.

Just days after its opening, Ukraine filed a complaint with the International Tribunal about the bridge, claiming that it violated the nation’s sovereignty.

Easier access between Russia and Crimea has also heightened concerns about a demographic shift on the peninsula.

Ukrainian officials say hundreds of thousands of Russians have migrated to Crimea since 2014, while 40,000 Crimeans have registered as displaced persons on mainland Ukraine, RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty reported.

One minority leader in Crimea, where an estimated 65 percent of the population is now Russian, asserted that as many as one million Russians have made their way across the Kerch Strait.

“Forcibly shifting the demographic composition of an occupied territory is a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Conventions,” Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev said in an interview with the news agency Ukrinform, RFE/RL reported.

In order to show the ills of the Kremlin – and in a plot fit for a James Bond film – the Ukrainian Security Service staged the murder of a Russian journalist in exile in Kiev last week.

He’d fled Russia in 2017 for his critical war reports, and in faking his death, Ukrainian authorities uncovered a Russian state-sponsored plot, the Associated Press reported.

But the machismo, bridge scenes and plot twists aren’t just made for TV, wrote the Economist: Ukraine is showing it’s willing to play Russia’s own game of covert operations and cover-ups in order to get ahead in the conflict.

The question now is how far it all goes