Ukrainian officials closed the canal, which supplies most of the peninsula's water, after Russia annexed Crimea. "So it's too scary to go back now," she says.ĪFP via Getty Images A picture taken in Crimea's Kirovsky region on April 27, 2014, shows an empty Northern Crimean Canal.
She'd like to return home but fighting continues just a few miles from where she used to live. She now lives in a small town outside of the Polish city of Gdansk. Olenenko studies agriculture in southeastern Ukraine near the city of Mariupol but fled to Poland soon after the February invasion. The diverted water from the Dnipro River, Olenenko says, turned Crimea into "the land of agriculture and the land of rice growing." Olenenko says grain yields increased four or five times. They built rice paddies and even fish farms. All of a sudden, farmers were able to plant fruit orchards. It turned the semiarid northern plains of the Crimean Peninsula into a lush agricultural region. The North Crimean Canal was built in stages during Soviet control of Ukraine in the 1960s.
The canal flows from the Dnipro Riverīefore Russia annexed Crimea, Olenenko says, 85% of the peninsula's water came from mainland Ukraine. "Putin and the government promised to the Crimean people that they would solve the water problem in Crimea," she says. There were multiple reasons why Russia invaded Ukraine, Olenenko says, and restoring the flow of water to Crimea was one of them. "I think that this shows us the importance of that issue ," she says. The Kremlin had been fuming about the dam ever since.Īnna Olenenko, an agriculture historian from the Khortytsia National Academy in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, points out that blowing up the dam and restarting the flow of water toward Crimea was one of Russia's first acts of the war. Ukraine barricaded the North Crimean Canal in retaliation for Russia seizing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Two days into Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February, Russian military forces blew up a dam that Ukraine had built to cut off Crimea's primary water supply.
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