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Crimea and Sevastopol

Ukraine’s new PM denies his own words on water supply to Crimea

Following the 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine and subsequent reunion of Crimea and Russia, Ukrainian authorities stopped supplying water to the peninsula via the North Crimean Canal

KIEV, March 6. /TASS/. New Prime Minister of Ukraine Denis Shmygal denied his own words on water supply to Crimea.

Speaking Thursday on Ukraine’s 1+1 TV, Shmygal said that water supply to Crimea "is not an issue of trade with the occupant, not a business issue."

"It is an issue of humanitarian responsibility before people who live in Crimea. Failure to supply water would lead to humanitarian catastrophe. We don’t want to be its authors," he noted.

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The Prime Minister specified that he was talking about water "that Ukrainians would use for personal consumption, not for industrial objects."

"We cannot fail to supply water to Ukrainians. Crimea is Ukraine," he concluded.

His statement was widely reported by the media. However, after just a couple of hours, the Prime Minister denied his words in a Facebook post, claiming that he was misunderstood, and saying that talk shows "is not the best format to discuss complex issues, such as water supply to Crimea."

"Our position remains unchanged: we would like to supply water to our citizens, but we cannot and have no technical option to do that until the peninsula is de-occupied and returned to Ukraine," Shmygal wrote, adding that "this thesis got lost in the noise of the studio."

Following the 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine and subsequent reunion of Crimea and Russia, Ukrainian authorities stopped supplying water to the peninsula via the North Crimean Canal. This canal was built in the 1960s, to provide water to arid territories of Kherson and Crimean Regions of the then-Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from the Kakhovskoye Reservoir, created in lower Dnieper. This supply covered up to 90% of Crimean water demand. In the past five years, Russia implemented a project to use Crimea’s underground water reserves to meet the needs of the peninsula’s population.

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Crimea and Sevastopol

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