According to Mikhail Delyagin, the Director of the Institute of Globalization Problems, the Crimea has a great chance to become Russia's showcase.
"As a result of the Nazi coup that has been fully supported by the West and partly organized by the West, even though there was an objective factor - excessive embezzlement - the state has vanished," Mikhail Delyagin, the Director of the Institute of Globalization Problems, told VK in an interview.
"When a parliament starts its activities by overriding its own constitution and continues to do so, in fact it becomes a fake institution. There is no more statehood in Ukraine. In this situation a spontaneous reunification with Russia commenced - as a result of people's will and not as a result of the efforts of the Russian bureaucracy," he said.
"From this perspective, Crimea is the first episode in this reunification process. I would like to stress, I have been closely following the reaction of the Russian authorities. There have been none of the aggressive proclivities that we are accused of. We have come across an information war with the West, which has fully supported the Nazi coup. There is a corresponding tradition in Germany, what can you do. This allows us to cleanse ourselves of the Russian "Yanukovyches", of the offshore aristocracy that works for the West in any circumstances. An understanding that we will always be blamed for something by the West has dawned. And even if we disappear, we'll still be guilty of something, because we existed once. Therefore we are free from any commitment to the West. They are not real. To talk about Crimea, there are no unsolvable problems, but there is not a single problem that can resolve itself on its own. Therefore, one of the first visitors was Putin's aide on the economy Andrei Belousov, our best macroeconomist," the expert said.
"I hope that this work is already underway. Let us not forget that Crimea does not live on social benefits, on pensions. It lives on tourists. The number of 90 billion rubles a year of social investments in the infrastructure which has been calculated does not take into account the fact that we have to help private business in the Crimea, simply because it is necessary for people to live a relatively normal life, if the season isn't successful. Honestly, what are we going to do with Crimea?" he said.
"The worst thing to do would be to take modern Russia with all its vices, oligarchs and raiders and drag it to Crimea. Next year everyone will be looking at it, scratching their heads and asking: "Why did you do this?" And we ourselves will not be able to answer this question. A second option would be to turn Crimea into a showcase similar to the one that Saakashvili made of Georgian villages in South Ossetia. A third scenario would be to create a profit center in Crimea. Investments that are already being implemented now have to focus on profitability. When Egypt is shutting down, when Sochi is too expensive, there is an opportunity to really make money in the resort, if water problems are addressed with the help of agriculture. Crimea could become the "breadbasket" of Russia. We have a possibility to create in Crimea a model for Russia's future development, including technological progress. Because there is nothing in Crimea blocking Russia's development today - monstrous monopolies, monstrous bureaucracy. Ukraine has its own Ukrainian vices, but we have the opportunity to combine all the good things from the Ukrainian model with the good things that we have and create in the Crimea not a copy of today's Russia, but a model of Russia in the future, test this model and then replicate this model throughout our country," the expert believes.
