Last year's harvest was extremely poor, but Rustem hoped for the best. He saved almost all of the money he received for the grain to buy seeds, fertilisers and fuel this year. Last week, the man's patience ran out. The farmer from the Dzhankoy district did not receive any decision from the occupation authorities to provide water for irrigation and spent all his savings on family needs.

‘It's cheaper to do nothing,’ Rustem explained his decision.

In order to convince the local population that the blowing up of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station dam had no impact on the water supply of Crimea, the occupiers are practising unscientific fiction.

‘The Dnipro water will go to the peninsula via alternative routes,’ said the self-proclaimed Minister of Agriculture of Crimea Denis Kratyuk.

‘There are reserve channels that can somehow feed the North Crimean Canal system. It was built by people who were not stupid and has a lot of alternative solutions. We are discussing them separately with experts, and real work is underway in this direction,’ he said.

Specialists at this place got confused.

“What are backup channels? Such a term does not even exist, - the former employee of the North Crimean Canal does not hide his indignation with official lies.

“Maybe he means ponds? Well, then these are just swamps or lakes in the place where the river once flowed. How can they feed the channel? And there are no other rivers further south. It's just some set of meaningless phrases,” our interviewer states.

Unlike scientists who are well acquainted with the system of operation of hydraulic structures, “experts” from the occupying authorities radiate optimism. Sergey Ovechko, who calls himself the director of the Kherson branch of the Russian Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, proposes to throw a pipe into the Dnipro and pump water from there with a pump.

“Water intake can be done without a dam - just from the river bed, as it was done for Mykolayiv. That is, to supply water to Crimea, it is necessary to drive the canal into the pipeline, and a pumping station is needed. It will not be a problem to build a low-pressure pipeline under the current development of technologies,” the candidate of biological sciences, whose only scientific work is written in collaboration with three other biologists and is devoted to the purity of water in the Salgir and Biyuk-Karasu rivers, shares his “expert” hydrotechnic opinion.

“The pumping station in Mykolayiv pumped 100 thousand cubes of water per day. Daily consumption for Crimea without agricultural needs is about half a million cubes. It will take not one, but five such stations and ten threads of pipeline with a diameter of one and a half meters. For irrigation of fields, the numbers are even bigger. Before the dam burst, the calculations of pumping the canal into Crimea, taking into account the needs for irrigation, were somewhere around 240 million cubic meters per year. So, at least seven more powerful stations. Taking into account the sanctions and the complexity of the equipment, this is some fantasy,”  a former employee of the North Crimean Canal comments on Serhiy Ovechko's words.

The opinion that it is impossible to fill the canal without the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant is also expressed by Ukrainian experts.

“To do this, you need to raise the water to a very high level, at least five meters. This was the function of the reservoir to fill the North Crimean Canal. Not only to fill its channel, but to keep the water in it constantly, it came there from the Kakhovsky reservoir, which now does not exist,” Igor Pylypenko, Doctor of Geographical Sciences, Dean of the Faculty of Biology, Geography and Ecology of Kherson State University, said in an interview.

The scientist also added that it is currently impossible to organize the withdrawal of water from the Dnipro in the south of the Kherson region, as it's still a battlefield there, and the territory controlled by Ukrainian troops of the coast is being attacked and shot almost to the isthmus of the peninsula. This fact was confirmed by the self-proclaimed Crimean Minister Kratyuk. Having voiced his fantastic idea of a “backup channel”, the collaborator admitted that it will be possible to implement it only after the end of hostilities.

“At the moment, it's too close to the front line. Therefore, we are waiting,” Kratyuk summed up.

Crimean farmers don't have time to wait - there are only a few weeks left before sowing.

“Our salt flats are creeping up, and the sown areas are being reduced. The yield that year was low, and this, most likely, will be even lower. We are now guessing - whether to reduce the area in half, or even to put all the fields under steam. What is the point of investing in sowing if the crops dry up? Their promises do not water the fields!”, complains the agronomist of a large grain farm in the Pervomaisky district.

The occupation authorities do not plan any measures to support the affected farmers. They only give their advice - as fantastic as to hydraulic engineers. This is what Dzhankoy farmer Rustem calls the recommendation of the Ministry of Agriculture to switch from growing wheat to dairy farming - because, they say, it does not require much water.

“Well, it will cost less water for cows than for grain, but it is several times more expensive to equip a livestock farm than to sow a field, and then they will buy milk from me for three cents,” Rustem reflects and advises the occupiers with their advice to go “through the reserve channel” as soon as possible.

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