Pre-War Archive

Andrei Klimenko, BlackSeaNews. At least 2 cruise liners will visit the Black Sea ports in November 2012. Excluding Istanbul, they will call at least 4 ports: Yalta, Odessa, Constanta, Nessebar. The cruise season in the Black Sea will continue till November 25, of course, if weather does not interfere. If we aren't mistaken, that’s unprecedentedly long season...

Andrei KLIMENKO, BSNews Chief Editor. «ScanEx» (Russian Federation) sent us results of satellite monitoring of the Black Sea in September-October, 2012, detecting large sized ship source slick pollution in the Russian and Ukrainian sectors. We added our own investigation results to our colleagues’ researchers...

Andrei Klimenko, Tatiana GUCHAKOVA, BlackSeaNews. We based the following analysis of the current situation with competition in tourism in the Black Sea area on publications of the BSN news feeds. It is the authors’ opinion that some trends call the players of this market for significant adjustment of tourism policy - both in the Crimea, and in the region. Of course, if business can defer to the opinion of the experts :) ...

Andrei KLIMENKO, Tatiana GUCHAKOVA (photo), Michael ROZENSHTEIN (photo), BSNews. This conversation took place in early October, when the Moldovan diplomat and historian, Professor Victor Tvircun has worked for the first three months as the Secretary General of BSEC. We took advantage of his profession in order to talk about the "historic risks" and historical perspectives for the Black Sea economies...

Andrei KLIMENKO, BlackSeaNews. 2 years have made us convinced: nowadays the sea ferries are, perhaps, the only one link that ties together all the Black Sea countries. Despite all the nuances and relationship problems:). We have been preparing a series of publications on the Black Sea ferries for a long time. So, this one is just the very beginning. We have not found anywhere a single comprehensive schedule for the Black Sea ferries, thus, decided to start compiling it ourselves. And with our readers’ help...

Andrei KLIMENKO, BlackSeaNews. No less than 14 cruise ships will visit Black Sea ports in October 2012, compared to 5 in June, 11 in July, 7 in August, and 16 in September. They will visit at least 14 ports, besides Istanbul (in July they visited 12 ports, 11 in August, 13 in September and October).

1 mega-liner - QUEEN ELIZABETH – will visit the Black Sea for the first time.

Andrei Klimenko, Tatiana GUCHAKOVA, BlackSeaNews. For nearly 130 years tourist perception of the Crimea has been the naively usual and naively natural context of all the philistine concepts of its development... But six months ago, resorts and tourism have officially become number one priority of the new strategy of the Crimea ... What are the risks and what the Crimean government can rely on? What will turn out of this?

Andrei Klimenko, BSNews. At about 07:15 (LT) September16, 2012 we noticed smoke in the hard-to-reach location at the foot of the rocky slope of the Ai-Petri Mount at the height of about 200 meters above the waterfall Ychan-Su. About 8:10 helicopter Mi-2 of Yalta mountain-forest preserve showed up above the seat of fire. At 9:42 Mi-8 helicopter of the Crimean branch of Ministry of Emergency of Ukraine arrived from Simferopol and made the first discharge of water onto the fire seat ...

BlackSeaNews. 2012 Prime Yalta Rally, Stage of FIA European Rally Cup, is taking place during September, 14-16, 2012 using the mountain roads near city of Yalta and Ai-Petri Mountain. The Prime Yalta Rally 2012 is the 10th round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge (IRC).

Andrei KLIMENKO, BlackSeaNews At the very least, 16 cruise ships (instead of 5 in June, 11 in July, 7 in August) would call at the Black Sea ports in September 2012. Excluding Istanbul, they’ll visit, at least 13 ports. 2 mega-cruise ships ARCADIAand AZURA enter the Black Sea for the first time.6 vessel entries include overnight stay in a port - quite rare case in the Black Sea. 4 of them are the mega-vessels of about 300 meters in length, including famous QUEEN VICTORIA

Andrei KLIMENKO, Tatiana GUCHAKOVA, BlackSeaNews. In the past 20 years the Crimean economy «preferred» natural restructuring against the background of preservation of the big chemistry enterprises – a sheer market experiment... Spontaneity was especially evident in 2003-2008, when a massive market deviation occurred – land and construction businesses, which for the short period developed into main economic branches of the Crimea, by the present time have come to self-destruction ...

Andrei Klimenko, Tatiana Guchakova, BlackSeaNews .The structure of the Crimean economy, spontaneously formed by 2001and unchanged till nowadays , is the main challenge for the new team of the Crimean government. And it is not about reforming, but about the need to change radically and in a relatively short time an established, stably primitive and hopeless economic structure consisting of the post-Soviet leftovers with some individual market economy inclusions.

Andrei Klimenko, Tatiana GUCHAKOVA, BlackSeaNews. The nature of economic processes in the Crimea was never determined by tourism. It is just a myth. First and foremost, in Soviet times the Crimea was a military base and the center of the instrument-making and ship-building intended for military purposes. Resort specialization was just a social program meant for the USSR population and its cost-effectiveness was not needed then, while now ...

Dr. Carol WEAVER, Mukhtar HAJIZADA, CIES Policy Briefs №1 (Kadir Has University, Istanbul), special for BSNews. This Brief proposes a new idea of fully democratizing the BSEC. In order to bring about improved democracy, the Parliamentary Assembly of BSEC would have popular elections to its chamber...

Alla YAZ'KOVA, Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Over the two decades that passed after the USSR break-up, the previously rather calm and in a way peripheral Black Sea region has become a crossroad of multifaceted contradictions and geopolitical competition...