On the night of February 10, telephone communications and Internet services belonging to the company Ukrtelecom have been cut off. Together with it the mobile network operator Trimob shut down.
The central control room of the Ukrtelecom branch confirmed disconnection of the communication. “In response, the dispatcher service confirmed disconnection of Crimea from the communication. However, reasons of the disconnection have not been announced. Preliminarily neither Crimean branch, nor the line ministry received any information regarding the disconnection,” the “Ministry” of Internal Affairs, information and communication of Crimea informs.
At 3 a.m. the “Ministry” set the recovery work to provide working efficiency of emergency services and other governmental bodies. By 8 a.m. the landline phone communication has been recovered in full scale in Crimea. Intercity phone communication within Crimea also works.
The work on recovering of international phone communication and intercity calls from Crimea to Russia as well as the access to the Internet is in progress.
The Crimean blogger Liza Bogutskaya wrote on her page in Facebook that she had been aware about the disconnection of communication in Crimea, but the information hadn’t been reliable.
“Two days ago, a message came to my private inbox saying: “Liza. Orcs keep on behaving brutally. Today they were breaking all equipment in Ukrtelecom facilities, rooting away wires, dismounting equipment and destroying everything that could have been destroyed. What is it all about? Are they going to leave? They always destroy everything behind themselves.”
“According to the Ukrtelecom administration, today at 1 a.m. the Republic of Crimea was totally disconnected from the services of communication, provided by the public company Ukrtelecom appeared,” Liza Bogutskaya writes.
The Crimean political analyst Taras Berezovets wrote in his Twitter that it is impossible to call to or outside of Crimea.
A correspondent of the online media Pod Pricelom failed to reach the Ukrainian number served by Trimob in Crimea.
As the director of public relations and communications for SCM Natalya Emchenko informed on her page in Facebook that armed people seized the Ukrtelecom office at night. At that time Ukrtelecom doesn’t control its Crimean department.
Ukrtelecom made an official announcement. According to the company, last night the physical disconnection of main conductive wire, connecting Crimea and the mainland Ukraine simultaneously in two directions has been detected from the territory of the peninsula. Besides, now its employees don’t have any access to “all the offices and technical facilities of the Crimean branch”. Ukrtelecom considers such actions as “an intended sabotage of a third party for the purpose of illegal seizure of private property.”
The “head” of Crimea Sergey Aksenov informed that communication will be restored on the territory of the peninsula within 24 hours.
“In the morning I have been reported that communication (the intercity communication line) had been recovered throughout Crimea. Half of users are already connected to the Internet. It is about 30 thousand subscribers. Now all our technical services are working on one issue – recovering of the communication. It is a challenging situation but we had groups of specialists formed in advance. We expected such incidents considering certain actions regarding Krymenergo,” he announced.
All services of communication will be recovered within 24 hours, – the press-service of the Council of Ministers informs.
The company Trimob, which provides services of mobile communication on the territory of peninsula, made an announcement on the official website.
“Presently voice services of mobile communications and access to the Internet for all the subscribers on the territory of Crimea are not available,” the company informs.
