Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 17 – Even though
Moscow is facing difficulties financial as well as technical building its
bridge to occupied Crimea, there can be little doubt that it will finally build
it, according to Pavel Kazarin, because this bridge, like the Sochi Olympiad is
not about business but rather about personal wealth and imperial greatness.
And that comparison with Sochi
suggests others as well: the corruption and malpractice involved in organizing this
effort will be commented upon but generally ignored with some rushing to
declare another victory for Vladimir Putin, and the real costs left afterwards both
at the site and to other Russians will be even more completely dismissed.
In a comment on RFE/RL’s Crimean
realities page, the Russian observer is explicit: “The Kerch bridge is like the
Sochi Olympics. It is not simply infrastructure but a real imperial symbol,”
and thus its construction will continue despite all obstacles in order to show
the power of the state (ru.krymr.mobi/a/27677728.html).
Many in Ukraine do not appear to
understand this, Kazarin says, and routinely express skepticism about the
project given the soft bottom of the waters there, the strong currents, and
other engineering difficulties. “But
none of this has any particular importance” given that “Moscow seized Crimea
not according to arithmetic budgetary logic.”
Moscow “needed [Crimea] as a
demonstration of greatness,” he continues, “and compared to the summary losses
from annexation both direct and indirect, the cost of the bridge looks even
relatively modest.” In short, Moscow is displaying the same logic on the Kerch
bridge that it did in Sochi.
To be sure, it was “strange” and “irrational”
to organize a winter Olympics “in the Sochi subtropics … but if it was
necessary to do so, they would do it,” he writes.
And this is part of a larger issue,
the commentator suggests. “The prospects for the completion of this or that
infrastructure object in Russia” don’t depend on the logic of the project
itself but on the strength of those behind it who will be its immediate
financial beneficiaries and on the ways in which that project suggests the
greatest of the Russian state.
Moscow will cut the pay of its
workers but not of those close to Putin who will benefit from government
largesse. And the main company involved
with the Kerch bridge is headed by Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s former judo
sparring partner and still one of the Kremlin leader’s “closest friends.”
That “biographic detail,” Kazarin
says, “is the best indication that the 246 billion [ruble] project will be
carried out to the end. Because this is not only an imperial project but also a
personal one,” just as was the case with Sochi and indeed with “the entire
history of the annexation of Crimea. Nothing business, only personal.”
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