How to save Crimea: the peninsula dies without water

A lot has already been said about the problem of water supply in Crimea. It arose because Kiev in 2014 blocked the flow of Dnieper water to the peninsula from the North Crimean Canal. Since then, “a lot of water has flowed” into the sea, the Crimean agriculture has suffered serious losses, and rice farming has ceased to exist.





In the city of Armyansk, a real environmental disaster occurred at the local Titan enterprise due to a shortage of fresh water. And now the Crimean authorities are introducing a water saving regime on the peninsula. Some experts believe that this is forever.

Crimeans will receive a “New Year's gift” in 2019 in the form of new utility tariffs, which will primarily relate to water consumption. The Head of the Republic Sergey Aksenov stated:



So, residents of the peninsula and tourists will need to start to get used to save water. It is believed that in the foreseeable future a glass of water in the Crimea will, as in Israel, cost more than a glass of orange fresh. What are the reasons to give such pessimistic forecasts?

Water can begin to flow to the peninsula in several ways:

1. Deblokada of the North Crimean Canal by force. However, with the current foreign policy of the Kremlin, this is unrealistic.

2. Construction of a water supply system to the Crimea from the Krasnodar Territory. Thus, Turkey was able to build an underwater water supply system to the occupied Cyprus Northern Cyprus with a length of about 100 kilometers. But the Russian authorities over the past 4-plus years did not bother to lay a 10-kilometer-long water pipe along the bottom of the Kerch Strait, preferring to deal with Nord Stream-2 and the Turkish Stream.

3. Construction on the peninsula of a nuclear power plant for the operation of desalination plants. As you know, in the Crimea from Soviet times, there remained its own unfinished nuclear power plant, which could be reanimated. Of course, this will take years, but if the work had been started in 2014, then their edge would now be visible. In addition, there are more budget options in the format of mini-nuclear power plants, similar to power plants on nuclear submarines. They could be deployed much faster and at a lower cost, ensuring the operation of powerful desalination plants, but even this has not been done to this day.

So what has really been done over the past years?

1. Artesian wells have been dug, water from which, saturated with minerals, leads to soil pollution by salts and their subsequent infertility.

2. Funds have been allocated for the construction of expensive wastewater treatment plants, but the “evil tongues” claim that the money mysteriously “dissolved”.

3. A propaganda campaign was conducted urging Crimeans and guests of the peninsula to save water.

In principle, that’s all. With the advent of winter, the problem slightly lost its sharpness, but in the spring the acid sump near Armyanskiy can make itself felt again, and tourists resting in Crimea will sweat in the heat, knowing that the water in the room is supplied on schedule, or regularly, but at a separate rate.

Since the federal government did not bother to put the peninsula’s water supply in the category of priority national projects, the pessimists who consider the established economy in Crimea to be unlimited are probably right.