AFP, Kiev :
Beyond Sunday’s referendum on whether Crimea should join Russia, one big question looms: how viable will the disputed peninsula be if it decides to split from Ukraine?
A week before the vote, a senior Russian lawmaker said Moscow was ready to provide more than $1 billion to the strategic Black Sea region, which is now under de facto Russian control.
Ukraine’s Finance Minister Oleksandr Shlapak meanwhile vowed that Kiev will continue to “cover all budgetary expenditures in Crimea… Crimea will be financed as normal.” All this money talk is indicative of the peninsula’s reliance on outside help to survive.
A rugged peninsula of two million people in Ukraine’s south, slightly smaller than Belgium, Crimea gets 85 percent of its water supplies and 82 percent of its electricity from the mainland, said Mihaylo Gonchar, an energy expert with Kiev’s Nomos Centre. State-owned company Chornomornaftogaz extracts 1.6 billion cubic metres of natural gas from the Black Sea every year, but this just about covers Crimea’s needs, he told AFP.
This will pose a major problem if Russia does take over the strategic region, the analyst warned. “Russia will not be able to provide short-term compensation for Ukrainian resources to the Crimean peninsula because infrastructure connections do not exist between Russia and Crimea,” he said.
A bridge project that has long been in the planning stages will not be ready for years. “There will be bad consequences for Crimeans in any case” if the peninsula is annexed by Russia, Gonchar warned.
Located on the Black Sea, a prime holiday destination under the Soviet Union, Crimea’s economy still relies heavily on tourism, with resorts such as Yalta and Evpatoria attracting crowds in the summer.
But with Russian soldiers and warships now in place of sun-seeking tourists and cruise ships, the resorts are already looking at a loss-heavy season.
“A lot of people have decided not to go to Crimea on vacation because it’s dangerous, it’s not a safe place,” said Sevgil Musaeva, a well-known Ukrainian economic journalist.
“So a lot of people will go to Turkey or Sochi,” the Russian Olympic resort that is currently hosting the Paralympic Games even as the threat of war looms across the vast sea.
“Last year there were more than two million tourists in Crimea, what will it be this year? I can’t imagine,” Musaeva said.
Companies, which may lose clients if not their entire business if Crimea switches allegiance from Ukraine to Russia, were not yet panicked in her opinion.
“They’re just shocked by this whole situation, they can’t believe it. Yesterday, it was Ukrainian territory, now there are a lot of soldiers near offices, a lot of Russian flags on city halls, on schools.”
