Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 29 –
Vladimir Putin’s decision to disband the Crimean Federal District which he
created after the Russian seizure of that Ukrainian peninsula in 2014 is
intended to reduce the attention of Russians to the rising and unmet costs of
what had been the centerpiece of his foreign policy, according to Vitaly
Portnikov.
Far more attention has been devoted
to the Kremlin leader’s reshuffling of officials and installation of more
siloviki in key regional positions than to the suppression of the Crimean
Federal District and the inclusion of occupied Crimea in Russia’s Southern Federal
District, he says (liga.net/opinion/291689_krym-kotoryy-lopnul-kak-putin-snova-obmanul-poluostrov.htm).
But officials are often shifted
about, while federal districts are not “liquidated” nearly as often – and especially
not one in which Putin had invested so much political capital in order to show
that he had raised Russia “from its knees” and restored its former power and
glory, Portnikov continues.
The Crimean Federal District was
created on the territory of “two occupied Ukrainian subjects, the Autonomous
Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol,” and its existence “symbolized the special
status of the annexed region within the Russian Federation,” a status which
gave its leaders direct access to Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.
Putin’s establishment of the
now-defunct federal district also gave him the opportunity to reward “two
military criminals,” Oleg Belaventsev and Sergey Menyailov, who have now been
dispatched to the North Caucasus and Siberia where they may be able to engage
in even more corrupt activity than they have in Crimea.
Crimea, in Putin’s new scheme, will
be under the head of the Southern Federal District, “one of the most odious
representatives of the Russian force structures, former procurator general of
Russia Vladimir Ustinov” who can be counted on to behave in the future as he
has in the past and not to give Crimea more than any of the other parts of his
domain.
What this means “in practice,”
Portnikov says, is that “Putin and Medvedev have simply had enough of ‘sacred’ Crimea
as they would any useless toy,” especially one that needed money that Moscow
does not have. And they have also “had enough” of complaints by the leaders of
other regions who have been insistently asking why Crimea should get more than
they.
“Now money for the development of
Crimea will be distributed among other regions of Russia not in Moscow but in
Rostov,” Portnikov says, and Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev and his
colleagues in the Southern Federal District aren’t going to concede anything to
it in comparison to their areas.
So as far as the future is
concerned, there will not be “any special Crimea.” Indeed, this latest move
will mean that “there will not be any Crimea in Russian political life and
possibly propaganda ever again. It will be one of the poor republics within the
Southern District as well as a military base in Sevastopol.”
No one in Moscow or elsewhere in
Russia is going to be “interested in Crimean roads, Crimean budgets, Crimean
pensioners, and Crimean tourists.” Duma
deputies won’t be focusing on it or on the shenanigans of the Russian occupiers.
As for the people of Crimea, “they will immediately remember their Ukrainian
citizenship” and behave accordingly.
There is only one positive aspect of
this latest Putin decision: when the time comes for Crimea to be returned to
Ukrainian sovereignty and control, no one will have to disband a federal
district: that has already been done. Instead, it will only be necessary to
take two subjects out of another federal district to do the job.
No comments:
Post a Comment