Peninsula of Bad Luck

On December 2, Vladimir Putin flew to the Crimea, commissioned the first stage of the energy bridge, promised a quick victory over the "end of the world" and flew away. Until better times, which is not clear when the cable will now come , thrown across the Kerch Strait, supplies 127 MW to the de-energized peninsula. The authorities promise to double this flow from day to day. Probably, the Russian president flew away with the feeling that the problem was closed. What else could his entourage tell him? That the total deficit of Crimea is up to 700 MW? That in order to compensate for them, it is not enough to stretch cables along the bottom of the strait? That it is impossible to tape energy cables to the Kerch wires, that it is necessary to build a substation and pull power lines to the Simferopol energy hub, where Ukrainian electricity was supplied? That without this, any megawatts from the Kuban will only illuminate Kerch and the crossing?

Or, perhaps, the environment dared to tell Putin that it would take at least a year and a half to normalize the situation with the light? That there are no extra hundreds of megawatts in the Krasnodar Territory itself? That all this time the peninsula will be on a starvation energy ration?

Hardly. Because to say this is to admit that Crimea remains Ukrainian in terms of infrastructure. That tourists should not be expected in the summer, because it makes no sense to go on vacation to a region with rolling blackouts. That any industry is doomed because factories cannot afford to produce megawatts on diesel generators. Moreover, the resource of diesel generators is not designed to work in conditions where an emergency situation becomes a regular state of affairs.

Because then the president's entourage will have to admit: no Potemkin village can be built from Crimea. That the peninsula, withdrawn from Ukraine, claims to be a suitcase without a handle, and not a pearl in the imperial crown. That the entire royal army and one seventh of the land are not able to equip life in the very region that in two years they managed to saturate with all possible sacred meanings.

But it is precisely for the sake of Crimea that Russia has put itself out of the brackets of the global political and economic equation. This is the same story when a single mistake leads to a vicious circle of walking on a rake. The Kremlin unleashed a war in the Donbass - only to bury the annexation in this conflict. When the process stalled, he sent the military to Syria to shift the Ukrainian issue into the background. And as a result, he buries the passengers of the A321, cuts relations with Ankara and stands on the verge of a collision between the "Russian" world and the "Turkish" one.

Crimea has become the alpha and omega of all the events that have taken place over the past two years. Sanctions, anti-sanctions, humanitarian convoys, the downed Boeing, the assassination of Nemtsov, expulsion from PACE, Nadezhda Savchenko, radioactive ash, Oleg Sentsov, a foreign agent – ​​this everyday vocabulary became possible thanks to the peninsula.

The very one for which the Kremlin decided to go to war. The same one, because of which the economy cannot find the bottom in any way. The same one, because of which Russia began to peer into the abyss, and the abyss began to peer back.

The same peninsula that Moscow is now unable to provide even with the bare necessities.

The entire royal army and one seventh of the land are not able to equip life in the very region that they managed to saturate with all possible sacred meanings in two years