State of emergency declared in Crimea after electricity pylons 'blown up'

[inanna]

Source: Reuters

29 minutes ago

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A state of emergency has been declared in Crimea after pylons carrying electricity from Ukraine were blown up cutting off power to almost two million people, media and the Russian government said on Sunday.

The Russian Energy Ministry didn't say what had caused the outages, but Russian media reported that two pylons in the Kherson region of Ukraine north of Crimea had been blown up by Ukrainian nationalists.

The attack, if by Ukrainian nationalists opposed to Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine last year, is likely to further increase tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

<snip>

On Saturday, the pylons were the scene of violent clashes between activists from the Right Sector nationalist movement and paramilitary police, Ukrainian media reported.

The pylons had already been damaged by the activists on Friday before they were blown up on Saturday night, according to these reports.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/electricity-ukraine-crimea-shut-off-power-pylons-blown-055657593.html

[progree]

1. Cutting off power to nearly 2 million people - that's the entire population of Crimea

Google reports a 1.967 million population in 2014.

[shenmue]

2. Oh shit

[roguevalley]

3. all the bad is starting to

happen. Putin is a psycho

[Purveyor]

5. Just why would Putin want to put Crimea in the dark? Answer=He wouldn't. eom

[CJCRANE]

10. Ukrainian neo-nazis did it. nt

[passiveporcupine]

4. What are the temps there right now?

If it's winter there like it is starting to be here, a lot of people could die before they get the power back up.

Just googled it, and can't tell if the temps I'm seeing are F or C, but either way it is very cold.

[progree]

13. Today 68 deg, tonight 57 deg, definitely farenheit.

Mild, fortunately.

http://www.accuweather.com/en/ua/simferopol/322464/weather-forecast/322464

68 deg celsius is 154 deg F.
57 deg celsius is 135 deg F.
So the 68 and 57 can't possibly be celsius

[magical thyme]

14. what temps did you see, because I'm seeing 60s F as high all week

with upper 40s as low until next Sunday, when 43 is the low.
http://www.accuweather.com/en/ua/simferopol/322464/weather-forecast/322464

Also, Crimea has a mild climate overall...essentially Mediterranean.
http://www.blacksea-crimea.com/climate.html

More important will be things like water.

[passiveporcupine]

29. I don't have a link now

Maybe I had an old web image from another date? It looked like a valid weather page.

[MowCowWhoHow III]

6. So Putin annexes Crimea 1.5 years ago (against Ukraine's wishes to put it mildly)

But they still completely rely on Ukraine for electricity ?!

Disaster waiting to happen has happened.

[darkangel218]

7. +1

[joshcryer]

9. It's a damn miracle it hasn't happened before now.

[CJCRANE]

11. But Ukraine relies on Russia for natural gas.

The world is complicated like that sometimes.

Kind of like how Isis also sells their oil to other Syrians who might be against them.

[Demeter]

12. A power grid is like a safety net: cut a hole in it, and everybody falls out

I wouldn't be surprised if power plants not in Crimea start melting down because they can't push the power anywhere, and adjustments weren't made in time.

[Igel]

17. Outcry here.

This was a bad thing.

Then again, in the last couple of weeks a dozen or so Ukr soldiers have been killed by shelling and attacks from the separatist side. Not much said about those lives.

And last spring and summer a few places under Ukr control had problems with electricity and even water. Power pylons carrying backup power through separatist-held territory to Mariupol and to parts of Luhans'k province were blown up, not by accident. The main power lines were down because of fighting, and in Luhans'k province the power station Schast'e was periodically down because it was targeted by separatists for shelling. When the non-separatists relied on power lines running through separatist territory, Russians in the Kremlin had no problem with their lapdogs of imperialism blowing them. Up. (Russia also benefited, because they got to sell electricity to various and sundry folks. Not that Russia ever does anything for pecuniary self-interest. No. Never.)

When hundreds of thousands or millions were without power because pro-Russian nationalists and neo-Nazis cut the power, not so many of their progressive fellow-travelers seemed to care. It matters if the refugees, women, and children who suffer are in a country with a certain proportion of reactionary neo-fascists, it seems. Collective punishment is abominable, unless it's the right policy.

Yet DU by and large seems to think it's really only (R) that back the Great Putain sitting on the 7 hills of Muscovy, to skew a severely tortured allusion.

[Demeter]

20. And did you post those events? I seem to have missed them.

[polly7]

18. German Sociologists on Crimea’s Choice

by Konstanin Kosaretsky / February 11th, 2015

The attitudes of Crimeans were studied in January 2015. This representative sample included 800 respondents living on the peninsula, from all age and social categories. The poll had an error margin of 3.5%.

In answer to the most important question: “Do you endorse Russia’s annexation of Crimea?” 82% of the respondents answered “yes, definitely,” and another 11% – “yes, for the most part.” Only 2% gave an unambiguously negative response, and another 2% offered a relatively negative assessment. Three percent did not specify their position.

We feel that this study fully validates the results of the referendum on reunification with Russia that was held on March 16, 2014. At that time 83% of Crimeans went to the polling stations and almost 97% expressed support for reunification.

Ukrainians continue to question whether this was a credible outcome, but it is now backed up by the data obtained by the Germans. The 82% of the respondents who expressed their full confidence in the results of the Russian election make up the core of the electorate who turned up at the ballot boxes on March 16, 2014.

And now the moment of truth: “What is your opinion of what is being written by the Ukrainian media about Crimea?” Who could be a more objective judge on this issue than the residents of the peninsula themselves? Who else but they – who have been fated to experience all the pros and cons of both Ukrainian and Russian citizenship – could better evaluate the accuracy of the information being published? Perhaps no one.

Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/02/german-sociologists-on-crimeas-choice/

"Who could be a more objective judge on this issue than the residents of the peninsula themselves?" Who indeed?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016114130

[bemildred]

8. Winter is coming, time to get the war going again. nt

[jakeXT]

15. Time to finish that sea cable

Crimea currently receives about 600 MWt of electricity from Ukraine daily. Ukraine charges Crimea $0.06 per kW/hr from July 1.

After an underwater ‘power bridge’ to Crimea from the Krasnodar Territory is built, the Russian Black Sea peninsula will be supplied with 800 MWt of electricity from mainland Russia.

The first two out of four power cable lines are scheduled to go into operation in late December 2015, which will allow Crimea to receive about 400 MWt of electricity.

The works to lay a power cable from the Krasnodar Territory in south Russia to Crimea along the bed of the Kerch Strait will start in August, Crimean Fuel and Energy Minister Sergei Yegorov told TASS on Thursday.

http://tass.ru/en/economy/813130

[uawchild]

16. Pics of the neo-nazi Ukrainian "protestors" that are resorting to violence again

"On Saturday, the pylons were the scene of violent clashes between activists from the Right Sector nationalist movement and paramilitary police, Ukrainian media reported. "

Right Sector's political ideology has been characterized as nationalist,[17][18] ultranationalist,[19][20] neofascist,[21] right-wing,[22] or far right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Sector




http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=

[polly7]

19. Blackout in Russia’s Crimea after transmission towers in Ukraine blown up

State of emergency in Crimea
By Staff Writers, RT.com
RT.com
Sunday, Nov 22, 2015

Blackout in Russia’s Crimea after transmission towers in Ukraine blown up

Crimean authorities rushed to connect hospitals and other vital infrastructure to reserve power stations and generators late on Saturday after the four main transmission lines from Ukraine were cut off in an apparent act of sabotage. The regional energy ministry has created an emergency response center to deal with the power cut.

Nearly 1.9 million people have been left partly or fully without electricity. While important public facilities and infrastructure have been wired up to reserve sources of energy, homes all across the region have been left in the dark.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian police and journalists simultaneously posted social media reports of explosions in Chaplinka in the Kherson region, where power transmission towers supporting the lines delivering energy to Crimea are located. Photos of severed towers with a Crimean-Tatar flag hanging on one of them have been posted online.

Earlier on Friday, unidentified saboteurs damaged two of Kherson’s four electricity transmission towers, prompting Crimean authorities to issue warnings of possible power cuts. However, when local Ukrainian repairs crews attempted to reach the site, they were blocked by Crimean Tatar activists and Right Sector militants, who proclaimed they were taking the area “under protection,” TASS reported.

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_72250.shtml

[Helen Borg]

21. Vulnerable critical infrastructure...

Major problem in today's society. If somebody wants to create trouble it is easy to do.

[PatrynXX]

22. key word is Nationalists

which one knows to be the opposite extreme opposite of Socialists so we know who did it. the hard right which the chickenshit ex President of Ukraine couldn't take care of to begin with which started this whole mess..

[Babel_17]

23. Tatars have reason for resentment (not saying they were involved)

It's odd how they don't get mentioned all that much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatars

Crimean Tatars constituted the majority of Crimea's population from the time of its ethnogenesis until mid-19th century, and the relative largest ethnic population until the end of 19th century.[8][9] Almost immediately after the liberation of Crimea, in May 1944, the USSR State Defense Committee ordered the removal of a majority of the Tatar population from Crimea, including the families of Crimean Tatars serving in the Soviet Army - in trains and boxcars to Central Asia, primarily to Uzbekistan. Starting in 1967, some were allowed to return to Crimea, and in 1989 the USSR Parliament condemned the removal of Crimean Tatars from their motherland as inhumane and lawless. Today, Crimean Tatars constitute approximately 12% of the population of Crimea. There remains a large diaspora of Crimean Tatars in Turkey and Uzbekistan.

On March 18, 2014, the day Crimea was annexed by Russia and Crimean Tatar was declared one of the three official languages of Crimea, it was also announced that Crimean Tatars will be required to relinquish coastal lands on which they squatted since their return to Crimea in early 1990s and be given land elsewhere in Crimea. Crimea stated it needed the relinquished land for "social purposes", since part of this land is occupied by the Crimean Tatars without legal documents of ownership.[45] The situation was caused by the inability of the USSR (and later Ukraine) to give back to the Tatars the land owned before deportation, once they or their descendants returned from Central Asia (mainly Uzbekistan). As a consequence, Crimean Tatars settled as squatters, occupying land that was and is still not legally registered.[citation needed]

Some Crimean Tatars fled to Lviv, Ukraine due to the Crimean crisis.[46]

On 29 March 2014, an emergency meeting of the Crimean Tatars representative body, the Kurultai, voted in favor of seeking "ethnic and territorial autonomy" for Crimean Tatars using "political and legal" means. The meeting was attended by the Head of the Republic of Tatarstan and the chair of the Russian Council of Muftis.[47] Decisions as to whether the Tatars will accept Russian passports or whether the autonomy sought would be within the Russian or Ukrainian state have been deferred pending further discussion.

[EX500rider]

26. Images on social media show Ukrainian flags on some damaged pylons-and Crimean Tatar flags on others

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34893493

[Babel_17]

27. Thank you for that heads-up from the BBC

Going to read it now.

[Sunlei]

25. Putin can buy power for his new Crimea seaport stolen from Ukraine.

[lanlady]

30. the only Nazis in this situation--

are the ones marching to the Kremlin's orders.

Vladimir Putin has unleashed thousands of Russian nationalist psychopaths, criminals, saboteurs and mercenaries into Crimea and eastern Ukraine to his dirty work - annexing territories, expropriating/stealing 100s of millions of dollars of private property, oppressing Tatars and non-Russians, wrecking businesses and homes, raping and killing - it's criminality on a scale that hasn't been seen in Europe since the days of Slobodan Milosevic.

Yet there are people on DU who DEFEND Putin. Un-freakin' believable, that anyone should think the Ukrainians brought this on themselves or are the guilty party here. The Ukrainians are defending their homeland from a predatory outside aggressor, one who is banking on the stupidity and gullibility of people in the West to overlook what is happening in that unhappy country.

Watch the excellent Netflix movie Winter on Fire. Ready a history book, any history book, about Russia and the USSR. Read about the Holodomor, the Great Famine in Ukraine in the 1930s that was the result of Stalin's policies of genocide toward the Ukrainian people. And maybe then you'll understand that UKRAINIANS ARE THE VICTIM HERE.

[Babel_17]

31. I think you'll appreciate this

https://news.vice.com/video/selfie-soldiers-russia-checks-in-to-ukraine

I posted it at DU a while back.

Selfie Soldiers: Russia Checks in to Ukraine
June 16, 2015 | 12:00 pm

As the conflict in Ukraine continues, so too does Russian President Vladimir Putin's denial of any Russian involvement. But a recent report from think tank the Atlantic Council used open source information and social media to find evidence of Russian troops across the border.

Using the Atlantic Council's methodology, VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky follows the digital and literal footprints of one Russian soldier, tracking him from eastern Ukraine to Siberia, to prove that Russian soldiers are fighting in Ukraine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Ostrovsky

That wikipedia article is new to me and, wow, truly amazing.

[inanna]

32. Did you reply to the wrong person? n/t