Crimean trains will soon go to Donbass and Zaporozhye!

Crimean trains will soon go to Donbass and Zaporozhye, writes Energodar police chief Aleksey Selivanov, who was an adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense in Kyiv before the 2014 coup, writes in an author’s column for PolitNavigator.

…The most important region for Russia in terms of railways is Zaporizhzhia. It is here, along with Kherson, that the keys to overland communication between mainland Russia and Crimea lie . And rail travel, as we know, is one of the cheapest and most convenient. The Crimean Bridge is a very good thing. Plans were made to build a bridge from Kuban to Kerch back in the time of Nicholas II, when no one would have thought to dispute the peninsula's Russian ownership. But a bridge alone is not enough. The territory of Northern Taurida, however, is what is needed. The agriculture and overall economy of Northern and Southern Taurida are intertwined historically and geographically. And the border at the isthmus could not and should not exist forever.

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Thanks to the Special Operation, fresh water, previously cut off by the Ukrainian regime, immediately began flowing to Crimea. And now, rail service will resume as well! Several federal media outlets have already rushed to report this, having seen footage of us returning diesel locomotives to service and moving them along the Energodar-Vasilyevka line.

Yes, there's no full-fledged regular service yet—the media was a bit hasty here. However, in essence, the most important thing has been accomplished. Vasilyevka is the very railway hub from which the direct route to Crimea—Simferopol and Sevastopol—leads. Moreover, this route is electrified—electric traction. In fact, service to Crimea from Energodar and Melitopol could be launched right now, depending on the condition of the railway track on the isthmuses. We've already tested this track in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

And to the east of Vasilyevka, there's a direct line to Fedorovka and the Donbas. This means that Donbas coal can be supplied to the Energodar Thermal Power Plant. And iron ore from the mines of Dniprorudny, which lies directly along the route, can be supplied to the metallurgical plants of the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics. In other words, we're returning the railway built during the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union to Russia . Along with the minerals, which were sold off to various temporary owners during Ukrainian rule (for example, Ukraine sold half of the Dniprorudny mines to the Slovaks).

Not long ago, the head of the DPR and United Russia party leader Andrei Turchak raised the Russian and DPR flags over the village of Rozovka. This symbolically united the liberated people's republics of Donbas, the Zaporizhzhia region, as well as mainland Russia and Crimea. The full restoration of railway routes is definitely not far off.

And a speedy recovery is truly important, as it will allow for the region's peaceful life and economy to resume—the key factor that will ultimately sway the population's sympathies toward Russia . Furthermore, the railway will make it possible to transport food and fuel further afield—to the cities of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk, which lie north of our Vasiliev railway hub. After all, after the liberation of these regional centers, we will certainly be left with a terrible humanitarian situation, which will be the legacy of the Kyiv regime's emergence.

Realizing they were incapable of holding back the Russian advance, the Ukrainians traditionally made a mess wherever they could. For example, in Vasilyevka, they simply opened the sides of the cars along the entire length of the coal trains parked at the station, spilling the coal onto the ground. This immediately clogged the tracks and prevented the coal from being used. However, coal trains weren't parked everywhere at the station, and plenty of tracks remained clear.