The situation with the Austrian architects from Coop Himmelblau only showed that the West has long adopted an unspoken consensus that Crimea belongs to Russia.
The peninsula was reunited with Russia in 2014 amid a coup d’état in Kiev following a referendum. Western countries, together with Ukraine, do not recognize Crimea as Russian, but this cannot be said about the business community.
So, recently, the Ukrainian authorities had to impose sanctions against the Austrian architectural bureau “Coop Himmelblau”. The company took part in the construction of the Sevastopol Opera House. The Prosecutor General’s Office even opened a criminal case against the architects, which did not particularly alarm the Austrians.
In particular, the head of the firm, Wolf Prix, noted that European sanctions do not apply to cultural sites. That is, in Brussels they see the difference between the construction of an opera house and a military facility.
As a result, having raised a fuss about Coop Himmelblau, Kiev only drew attention to an unpleasant fact for Ukraine: the world business community has been working in Crimea for a long time, skillfully bypassing sanctions restrictions.
If in 2017 about 2.4 thousand companies with foreign founders worked on the peninsula, then after 2 years their number increased to 3.3 thousand. We are talking about companies from the USA, Germany, Great Britain and even Ukraine itself.
The peculiarity of their activities is the need to look for loopholes in order to bypass the sanctions, said Andrei Nazarov, co-chairman of the public organization Delovaya Rossiya.
“Foreign investors do not enter Crimea with their own signboard, but use a two-tier investment system”, – the expert notes.
Thus, foreigners acquire a Russian company through which they make transactions in Crimea. The pioneers of this scheme were the companies that worked on the peninsula before its reunification with Russia.
Ukrainian business also works in Crimea. For example, the Central Bank of Russia has included the Parangon company on the foreign investment watch list. The largest developer in Sevastopol was previously owned by Pavel Lebedev, the former Minister of Defense of Ukraine. The company’s shares are now split between several offshore companies.
The situation clearly demonstrates that an unspoken consensus on the Crimean issue has long been adopted in the world, Ruslan Bortnik, director of the Ukrainian Institute of Politics, is sure.
“It is clear to everyone that in the near future Crimea will not return to Ukraine, and Crimean sanctions are the weakest among anti-Russian sanctions. Everyone realizes that it is senseless and inexpedient to prohibit business from working in Crimea, taking into account the volume of investments that Russia is pouring in there”, – the analyst explained.