“Crimeans must receive everything they are entitled to by law” — with this promise, Crimean Gauleiter Aksyonov concluded his “victorious” speech announcing that the Russian federal budget had allocated 5 billion rubles in compensation to the peninsula’s residents for the power outages. 

The occupiers are supposed to pay 15,000 rubles to every Crimean who was without power for two days or more. That means they owe 4.5 billion rubles just to the residents of sparsely populated northern Crimea. People have been trying to get compensation for three weeks now. It’s turned out to be no easy task. 

“I waited two weeks for a response. Today I finally got one: ‘Since the power outage was due to circumstances beyond the control of the RES (Regional Electric Networks — Ed.), payment is not possible.’ This is just some kind of mockery. If you’re not going to pay, why make promises?” says Konstantin, a retiree from the Dzhankoy District, indignantly.

For Crimeans of draft age trying to receive compensation, the occupiers are demanding certificates from the military registration office. And residents of villages where there has been no electricity for weeks suddenly find out that they… used to have it.

“Since June, I’ve been washing my clothes by hand and cooking porridge over a fire. But I’m not eligible for compensation — because the power has to be out for 48 consecutive hours. But here’s what they do: they turn it on for 10 minutes at night — and then turn it off. Then they can say there was power and we can’t question further. They’ll just embezzle this money and that’s it,” laments Gulnara, a resident of a village near Ermeni Bazaar (Armyansk). 

Fraudsters, however, are actively exploiting the promise of compensation. They call Crimeans pretending to be from social services and ask them to provide their bank card details, promising to deposit 15,000 onto the account. The number of people defrauded is currently unknown, but the occupying authorities are warning people about the danger. 

However, there are at least 2,000 victims of a fraudulent scheme organized by the occupiers themselves. These are buyers of so-called “commercial” trips to “Artek.” Each costs 175,000 rubles, equivalent to 2,000 euros. The camp was closed a month ago. Talk of refunds has only just begun. “The financial issue has been fully resolved,” Russian Education Minister Kravtsov stated reassuringly. And he promised to return the money… once the children’s center resumes full operations. “We’ll have to convert it to hryvnia,” users of Crimean social media groups write in the comments on this news story.