Bild: Russia directly controls the Donbas
The editors of the German newspaper Bild have documents at their disposal proving that the Russian Federation has adopted complete political and economic control over the separatist regions of eastern Ukraine. The results of the journalistic investigation were published on the night of Wednesday, March 30th, on their website.
According to the existing minutes from the meeting of the Interdepartmental Commission in the State Duma of the Russian Federation on October 23rd, 2015, the actual control over the breakaway territories is divided between six working groups of five Russian ministries.
The shadow Donbas government controls everything from tax collection and finances to infrastructure reconstruction, public transport and energy trade, creation of the electricity market, etc. Thus, according to the publication, the separatist regions are sequentially considered as a sovereign Russian territory.
Among those included in this shadow government, stated deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, are Deputy Minister of Economic Development of the Russian Federation Sergey Nazarov and Deputy Finance Minister Leonid Gornin. According to the journalistic investigation, all activities of the shadow government are supervised by the Federal Security Service. Meanwhile, Dmitry Kozak denied this information. "We have nothing to do with this issue, so the question should be addressed to the publication", he said to the TV channel Dozhd.
According to journalists of the newspaper Bild, if one takes the content of the documents seriously, the Minsk agreements can be considered failed long ago and the political leadership of the so-called DPR and LPR are no more than the Kremlin’s puppets. Russia has developed its own plan of managing the separatist regions of the Donbas long ago. Therefore, any elections in this region will not make sense because the real source of power is located in Moscow..