The Russian occupying authorities in Kherson Oblast have claimed they completed the construction of a government quarter near the town of Henichesk, although the buildings were erected before the full-scale invasion.

The Russian occupying authorities in Kherson Oblast have claimed they completed the construction of a government quarter near the town of Henichesk, although the buildings were erected before the full-scale invasion.

Source: Vhoru, a local news outlet in Kherson Oblast

Details: Vhoru notes that the occupying authorities in Kherson Oblast have repeatedly been caught lying about construction projects. This time, the illegal head of Kherson Oblast, Volodymyr Saldo, announced the completion of the government quarter on the Arabat Spit.

In February 2023, Saldo showed the Arabat Spit to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin. At the time, Saldo called the site they visited a government quarter. Now the occupying authorities claim that major construction works have been completed and the interior decoration of the premises is underway.

However, the so-called new construction is in fact seized buildings of a Ukrainian clinic, which had been under construction before the full-scale invasion, as Nataliia Koziavkina, director general of the Kozyavkin International Clinic in the town of Truskavets in Lviv Oblast, told Novyny Pryazovia (News of Pryazovia).

Her father, Volodymyr Koziavkin, Doctor of Medical Sciences, academician and Hero of Ukraine, had planned to build a medical town on the Arabat Spit. The InterMedical EcoCity project envisaged the construction of 20,000 sq m in its first phase.

Although implementation of the project was delayed, by 2022 the first phase was completed. Yet in February 2023, Saldo presented the seized clinic buildings as a “Russian government quarter” supposedly built in nine months, Vhoru notes.

“In September 2022, Volodymyr Saldo also promised to build not only a government quarter on the Arabat Spit but also a new city for 30,000 people. The first residents were supposed to move into new houses in 2025, but three years have passed, and there is no city,” Vhoru says.

Oleh Baturin, a journalist from Kakhovka, told Novyny Pryazovia that Saldo had stated two factories would be constructed in the Henichesk hromada. [A hromada is an administrative unit designating a village, several villages, or a town, and their adjacent territories – ed.]

“He [Saldo] promised to build a housing construction plant and a gas concrete plant,” Baturin said. “He promised huge investments, jobs. In fact, these projects are nowhere near even the foundation stage. They are building ‘palaces of air’.”

Background:

More than 3,000 companies located in the temporarily occupied part of Kherson Oblast have been registered in the Russian business register since 24 February 2022. Many of them operated under Ukrainian law before the full-scale invasion but were either seized by the Russians or had their owners voluntarily decide to work under Russian law and continue business under the new conditions.It was also reported earlier that the water situation is rapidly deteriorating in the temporarily occupied part of Kherson Oblast: groundwater levels have dropped, crop yields have sharply declined, and the Russian authorities are taking no measures.The Kremlin is planning to increase the share of stolen grain from the occupied oblasts of Ukraine in Russia’s total harvest, as this year Russia itself will collect only a limited harvest due to drought, sanctions, and limited access to machinery, while grain sales in June already dropped by 34.5%.

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