Residents of the Crimean peninsula stayed at home yesterday as they endured a life without electricity after an attack on the power supply by unidentified assailants left most of Crimea’s two million people in the dark.
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Ukraine’s UNIAN news agency first reported Friday that two of four main power lines to Crimea had been damaged after an explosion.
The Ukrainian interior minister also suggested that the government cut off power supplies to the annexed peninsula which declared a state of emergency at the weekend after its main electricity lines from Ukraine were blown up.
On Saturday, transmission towers in Ukraine’s Kherson region were exploded, leading to a power supply shortage the region as well as a blackout in Crimea.
Ilya Kiva, a senior officer in the Ukrainian police who was at the scene, said on his Facebook page that the pylons had been “blown up”, as did the Kherson region administration.
Just who carried out the attack, now the subject of a police investigation, remains unclear but suspicion has fallen on Tartar activists.
TV and radio broadcasting services will not be interrupted and are now using an autonomous power supply, Russia’s Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications said.
A Crimean Tatar activist told Ukraine’s TV news broadcaster 112 Ukrayina that Russian Federation must release “political prisoners” and let their leader return to Crimea in exchange for repairs to the power lines.
Russian Federation has blamed Ukrainian nationalists and Crimean Tatar activists for the pylon damage, calling it “an act of terrorism”.
The activists have staked out the border between mainland Ukraine and Crimea since September, attempting to stop commercial trucks from passing.
In August, Russian Federation began laying a power cable along the bed of the Kerch strait, which separates Crimea’s Kerch Peninsula from the Taman Peninsula in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region.
VOA News reported on this story for VOANews.com.
In Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region government troops are battling pro-Russian separatist rebels, which Ukraine accuses Russia of backing.
Crimean authorities said they had managed to partially reconnect the cities of Simferopol, Yalta and Sevastopol using generators.
On Monday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko proposed suspending the dispatch of cargo to the peninsula while his government “defines the model for Ukraine’s future relations with the temporarily occupied territory of Crimea”, a presidential statement read.
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The incident is likely to increase tensions between Russian Federation and Ukraine, which, as well as being angry at Moscow for the annexation of Crimea, blames it for supporting pro-Russia rebels waging an insurgency in the east of the country.
