“This year, 211 cruise ships will call at Yalta,” the Crimean Ministry of Resorts announced on February 10, 2014. No one suspected that the peninsula was already swarming with “little green men.” “Celebrity Cruises”, “Costa”, and “Azamara Club” - the world's largest and most famous cruise companies - included Ukrainian Yalta in their itineraries. Giant liners called at the port at least every other day. Yalta residents still remember how four of them arrived at once in September 2013. The passenger terminal served 6 million people a year, and the cargo terminal was designed to handle 2 million tons of goods.

Yalta Sea Port, 2012

Last week, the Yalta Sea Port was put up for auction. The price is 1.5 billion rubles. Some apartments in Moscow cost significantly more.

"I finally understood that the port was doomed when the director announced that we would be able to fully meet Crimea's cargo transportation needs. Then it became clear that the Russians had no intention of investing in passenger shipping at all. Although there were many promises about new “Comets” to Sochi and Anapa," recalls Alexei, a Yalta resident who worked at the port for over twenty years. According to him, the decline began in the summer of 2014. Since then, cruise liners no longer stop in Yalta. Salaries began to be delayed, employees watched in horror as equipment was stolen, and within a few years, the port's staff was reduced by more than half. Of the 27 ships that served the port, only three remained afloat. And after the opening of the bridge across the Kerch Strait, the occupying authorities admitted that Crimean ports were doomed, as their potential could not be realized without the lifting of sanctions.

For some time, the Yalta seaport survived on “sea excursions” and rare visits by the Russian liner Knyaz Vladimir. First COVID, and then a full-scale invasion, finally put an end to these attempts. "The year before last, they sent a new director. One of the newcomers. He immediately announced that there were no orders at the cargo port, so everyone should be fired. And if orders come in? “We'll re-hire then. And that was the end of the conversation. Only later did we realize that he was already clearing the port for sale so that he wouldn't have to deal with us later, because in the format they had planned, port workers were not needed at all," one of the dismissed port employees told CEMAAT.

At the end of 2024, the last crew of the only steamboat still in operation at that time came ashore. The deserted port was removed from the state-owned enterprise “Crimean Sea Ports,” and all its assets in the form of shares were valued at 1.6 billion rubles. Then it became clear: the once powerful enterprise was being sold for a song to some “systemic investor.” In early July, the port's property was put up for auction, and in six months, the value of the assets mysteriously “shrank” by another hundred million. The final price and, possibly, the lucky owner of the port will be known on August 1, but already now, realtors are half-jokingly saying that they are ready to buy it for twice the price.

"Look, the enterprise includes 12 port facilities from Koktebel to Simeiz. All kinds of ticket offices, technical areas. All this is on the first line in the region, where the price for a hundred square meters of land on the coast starts from ten million. And there are hectares of territory there. Plus three and a half thousand square meters in the very center of Yalta, next to the marine terminal, which is also worth something. This price is nothing at all. I think my partners and I would chip in and easily offer twice as much, but there are such people behind the deal that it's dangerous to even joke about it," says Valentin, an employee of a Yalta real estate agency.

Rumors are circulating in Yalta that oligarch Yuri Kovalchuk, who is close to the Russian president, is behind the deal. However, one of the employees of the Yalta city administration, on condition of anonymity, told CEMAAT that this is a mistake. "At that moment, Kovalchuk was actively resolving the issue of buying another asset from the Crimean government, and in people's minds, one thing overlapped with the other. If they were being released now, there would be rumors that Gref (the chairman of the board of Russia's largest bank — Ed.) was buying the port because Sberbank is currently buying a sanatorium nearby," the official explains. According to his information, the buyers will be companies associated with other friends of Putin. This is indicated by the official transfer of the “gambling zone” from Katsiveli to the territory of the Yalta port, precisely at the time when the port began to be privatized and prepared for sale. The Rotenberg brothers are involved in the creation of the “Crimean Las Vegas.” They are also involved in the construction of a large yacht marina in Balaklava, which CEMAAT reported on earlier this year.

The occupiers are destroying the ancient Chembalo fortress in Balaklava to build a yacht marina

The idea of transforming the enterprise, which was a member of the International Association of Mediterranean Cruise Ports, into an ordinary marina is actively supported by Crimean collaborators led by the speaker of the occupation parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov. The sale of the port is justified in government documents by the “goal of ensuring the effective and rational use of property for the development and functioning of yacht tourism infrastructure.”

Crimeans have no illusions about the prospects of this “yacht tourism” and fear only one thing: for the sake of Kremlin yachtsmen, the port infrastructure will be completely rebuilt, and in some places completely dismantled for the sake of the construction of other facilities. And even after the liberation of the peninsula, the return of the Yalta port to the cruise liner route map will be postponed for a long time, if not forever.

‍