SEVASTOPOL, Crimea — More than three years after Russia snatched Crimea from Ukraine, the peninsula is suffering through an extended season of discontent.
Shady, Kremlin-appointed bureaucrats are proving to be just as corrupt and inept as their Ukrainian predecessors. International sanctions, shrugged off in the heady days after the Russian annexation, have jacked up food prices while endlessly complicating ordinary aspects of life, like banking and travel.
Perhaps most galling to Crimeans, the government is hauling thousands of residents into court to
confiscate small land holdings distributed free as a campaign ploy in 2010 when Ukraine controlled the Black Sea peninsula.
“I supported reunification because I thought that with Russia’s arrival things would improve,” said Lenur A. Usmanov, a rare outspoken Kremlin partisan from the Tatar minority who has since become a serial protester. “But there is no change.”
Yevgeny V. Dzhemal, an activist lawyer fighting the mass land expropriation, put it even more succinctly: “They were bastards under Ukraine, too. Nothing has changed.”
Locals largely focus on different complaints. They invariably denigrate the new bureaucrats as carpetbaggers, using the word “varyagi” in Russian, an old word for Viking outsiders, especially when it comes to land confiscation.
The city of Sevastopol claims that it must repossess at least 10,000 plots to help create a rational development plan. The owners howl that the “mass land grab” will benefit crooked developers and senior officials who covet what when stitched together amounts to sprawling tracts of choice seaside property.
“Nobody thought it would be as bad, with issues emerging suddenly like the land plots,” said Roman Kiyashko, the burly Communist Party candidate for governor whose campaign slogan, “Your man from Sevastopol,” emphasized his native roots. “Russian officials act like an elephant in a china shop. They just implement their policies with no feedback.”
“Stones can fall from the sky as long as we live in our Motherland,” said Oleg Nikolaev, a successful restaurateur, quoting a Russian expression.
In Sevastopol, the main target of local ire is Dmitri Ovsyannikov, 40, one of a new, nationwide generation of young governors. Appointed acting governor by Mr. Putin last year, he has alienated many Sevastopolians by filling virtually every administrative post with fellow Moscow imports. Even some local officials who support Mr. Putin wonder privately why the president picked someone so aloof.
They say government jobs have become a license to steal or extort, with wave after wave of officials across Crimea dismissed for corruption or incompetence, even more than under Ukraine. Russia is pouring money onto the peninsula — $650 million last year — and the scale of corruption has expanded accordingly, experts said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/30/world/europe/crimea-annexation-russia-ukraine.html
