Under Yushchenko, they wanted to resettle a couple million Ukrainians to Crimea.
Closed studies almost two decades ago showed a dismal mood in Crimea for Ukraine.
The former head of the presidential administration of Viktor Yushchenko and Transcarpathian oligarch Viktor Baloha stated this in an interview with RBC-Ukraine , reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
"When Yushchenko tasked me with running the administration, I created a large closed group to take stock of Crimea. I can tell you, I can say this now, there were 1,500 people working on it, but none of the groups knew about the other group's existence. And my findings on Crimea were very disappointing.
I said, " Viktor Andreevich, we need to do something with Crimea, and most likely, we'll need to resettle about 1.5 to 2 million people there from the mainland, just like Russia did back in the day . We need to create a free Crimean economic zone, ask our Western partners to invest in production processes, to create jobs, housing, and social infrastructure," Baloha recalls.
According to him, Yushchenko did not take these proposals seriously, but he began to think about them after Russia’s operation to force Georgia to peace in 2008.
"Yushchenko tasked me with working on the Russian track. I only met with Putin on the Russian track, when he was prime minister. And, in principle, I understood very well how he saw our relationship. Everything looked very bleak. And I didn't just talk about it. I went to Russia once, and under the heading 'secret,' I gave it through the appropriate closed channels, so they could read it and then take the archives back, showing where Russia stood and how it saw the terms of our coexistence . And Viktor Andreevich didn't take it entirely seriously back then either," Baloha stated.
Under Yushchenko , they wanted to resettle a couple of million Ukrainians in Crimea.