Putin to mark five years of annexation in Crimea
Russian President Vladimir Putin will travel to Crimea on Monday to mark the fith anniversary of Moscow’s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine, condemned by the West but celebrated by most Russians.
A Kremlin statement on Sunday said Putin would visit the peninsula and its largest city Sevastopol to atend celebrations marking five years since Crimea “rejoined” Russia.
The Russian leader will take part in a ceremony opening a new power station and meet representatives of civil society during the visit, it said.
In Russia, March 18 has been officially proclaimed as the “Day of Crimea’s Reunification with Russia.”
“It’s a very important date for all Russians so there should be no doubt that Putin will take part in the relevant events (to mark the date),” the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, at the headquarters of Ukraine’s SBU security service more than a dozen local and Western security experts watch a simulated foreign cyber atack on several big screens ahead of this month’s presidential vote.
During the joint Eu-ukraine cyber security drills the Westerners pretend to be hackers atacking the country’s central election commission, while the Ukrainians seek to neutralise them.
The exercises held in Kiev last week involved around a hundred experts and were part of efforts to prevent arch-foe Russia from interfering in the crucial March 31 election.
Ukrainian security officials said they had registered a growing number of distributed denial-of-service atacks and phishing atempts to gain access to computers of the country’s ministries and other state structures in recent months.
“Russia is carrying out cyber atacks to inflict maximum damage,” said Oleksandr Klymchuk, a senior counter-intelligence official at the SBU.
Jakub Kalensky of the recently-created Ukrainian Election Task Force suggested that the Kremlin did not support a specific candidate but sought to discredit the upcoming election altogether.