Krasnodar, 24 May – Yug Times. On Tuesday, 15 May, Russian President Vladimir Putin personally opened the road part of the Crimean bridge that joined the Taman peninsula of the Krasnodar region with Crimea.
It happened six months before the deadline scheduled by the governmental contract. The ceremonial opening was attended by many official persons, including Kuban Governor Veniamin Kondratiev. Speaking to the constructors, Mr. Putin thanked them for completing the project ahead of schedule.
“The first stage [of the project] must have been the most important one,” said President. “There is no doubt that you will manage to commission the truck traffic this autumn and the rail traffic in a year. It was a high-quality work completed on time. Well done!”
In his turn, Mr. Kondratiev stressed that “we have become eyewitnesses of the largest-scale project of the latest decades. It promises to become a symbolic event not only for the Taman [peninsula] but for the Krasnodar region on the whole.” He added that the bridge will turn South Russia into a single huge resort. “In total, we receive over 21 million tourists a year, and this figure will grow,” forecast Mr. Kondratiev. “The tourists that will go to the [Crimean] peninsula will visit the [Kuban] region and use our roads. According to preliminary estimations, the number of tourists using the roads in the [Krasnodar] region will grow from the current 6.2 up to 8 million a year.”
The event did not go unnoticed in the West, which is zealously following the way how Moscow is strengthening its ties with Crimea. So it was no wonder that the Western reaction was, to put it mildly, rather cold.
Ukraine and the West slammed the bridge opening as illegal. The bridge, constructed without Kiev’s consent, “constitutes another violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by Russia,” an E.U. spokesman said in a statement. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert called on Russia not to impede passing ships bound for other parts of Ukraine, although Russia claims that any merchant vessel would be able to go under the bridge. On the other hand, the construction experts and the politicians that try to give an objective assessment to the event say that the launch of Europe’s biggest bridge was an achievement of engineering ideas and a big victory of Russia.
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