Translated by Ollie Richardson & Angelina Siard

20:02:29
02/06/2018

vesti.ru

The President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko during the opening of a bridge crossing on the Odessa-Reni road the in the Odessa region stated his intention to build a bridge through the Danube. At the same time in Ukraine there are already large-scale infrastructure projects that are frozen because of a lack of funds.

For example, several metro stations in Kiev weren’t completed in decades, and the bridge over the Dnepr that was started in 1993 is already being sold for scrap metal. According to the sources in Ukrainian political circles who shared their views with RT, the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko is trying to score points before future presidential elections. Also, according to many experts, Poroshenko is trying to compete with Russia, where he recently opened car traffic along the Crimea Bridge.

Petro Poroshenko personally opened the bridge crossing the Moldavian village of Palanka on the M15 Odessa-Reni highway. Moldova handed over this section of road to Ukraine in 2011, and at the end of 2016 the bridge was declared as being in an emergency condition and was closed for overhaul. The work came to an end by the beginning of June, 2018. The length of the bridge crossing is 152 meters, and its width is 10 meters.

At a ceremonial opening of the repaired Poroshenko Bridge emphasised the importance of the event called by him as an “important international model”. According to the Ukrainian president, in the near future Kiev will be engaged in implementing new infrastructure projects.

Russian and Ukrainian experts are skeptical about Poroshenko’s initiative.

“This simply raises a smile. On the territory of Ukraine there are already widespread unfinished constructions. Including bridges, by the way,” said the academician of Academy of Political Sciences of the Russian Federation, the head of the department of Plekhanov Russian University of Economics Andrey Koshkin.

“This is a very strange statement. Ukraine can’t complete the bridge over Dnepr and lay the subway in the densely populated region of Troyeshchina — so what bridge through the Danube can we talk about? This is a project that will never be realised,” considers a source in the Samopomich party.

“Poroshenko’s statement in reality is an attempt to present something by the example of Russia, which built the Crimea Bridge. Petro Poroshenko has unsuccessfully tried to repeat these or those acts of the Russian government for a long time,” added Andrey Koshkin.

“The political process in Ukraine is only an imitation covering corruption mechanisms, by means of which its ruling clique enriches itself. And the bridge through the Danube is not unique,” said the political scientist Aleksandr Asafov. “For example, Kiev recently declared that they tasked themselves with launching a ‘hyperloop‘ (the project of the vacuum train Hyperloop was proposed by the American businessman Elon Musk in 2013). But in practice we can see what has resulted from at least the so-called ‘European wall’ — a system of fortifications that were supposed to be erected across the entire Russian-Ukrainian border. Money was stolen, and in reality only a small part of the fence from this meshed grid, which was safely spoiled by boars during migration”.

The crossing over the Danube, according to Asafov, is the answer to the bridge over the Kerch Strait: “Poroshenko makes such statements to ensure a maximum presence in the information field, since the presidential campaign is already ongoing. He needs to show ambitious plans, to show at least in media that the country develops, that everything inside it is good. But in reality the crossing over the Danube, the Ukrainian hyperloop, and the bridge to the Moon are the phenomena of about the same order of reality”.

“There are no concrete plans for construction, only an agreement with the president of Romania was reached. We so far can’t even imagine how much this bridge will cost and where it will be built in general,” stated the source in Poroshenko’s environment. “This message is more about Ukraine being able to implement large infrastructure projects”.

“If the fantastic ideas of the writer Jules Verne nevertheless were prophetical and were realised, then it doesn’t threaten Petro Poroshenko’s projects,” objects Aleksandr Asafov.

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