Larisa Vasilyeva claimed that the annexation of Crimea killed her brother.

But Igor Vasilyev did not die during the takeover of the Black Sea Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.

At 67, he is too old to fight for pro-Russian separatism in southeastern Ukraine. He was greatly encouraged by Crimea’s “return home”, so they raised their arms against the central government.

For many years, Vasilyev suffered from chronic heart disease.

Before the Kremlin spent billions of dollars to cut costs to restore Crimea’s infrastructure and “optimize” healthcare, he owned four ambulances in villages outside the Ural mountain city of Chelyabinsk, one of them She always reached out to him.

But his sister said that on November 13, 2015, the only remaining ambulance was late.

“It… arrived in three and a half hours. A death certificate is about to be issued,” said Vasilyeva, 71, who refused to disclose the name of the village.

The annexation of Crimea caused President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating to soar to 88%.

Considering that most of Russia’s coastline faces the Arctic and the North Pacific, the beaches, cypress trees and wine of the Black Sea Peninsula make it look like a holiday paradise.

However, if you look at the annexation of Crimea seven years from the perspective of financial analysis, the peninsula that has no land border with Russia looks completely different.

This was a financial victory, which had devastating consequences, triggered Western sanctions, undermined Russia’s economic growth, significantly affected the livelihoods of ordinary Russians, and even contributed to the once-famous crisis in the aerospace industry.

The Kremlin has spent tens of billions of dollars on infrastructure projects in Crimea, such as a bridge connecting the peninsula to the Russian mainland, which cost 3.7 billion dollars and is 19 kilometers long.

It invested heavily in new highways and hospitals, power plants, transmission lines, and subsidies to Crimea’s rapidly expanding population of more than 2.5 million people.

According to a study by former senior economists Daniel Ahn and Rodney Ludema of the US State Department, the Western sanctions imposed on the West after the annexation cost Russian companies more than $100 billion , Accounting for about 4.2% of Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP).

The research was published in the November European Economic Review. The report pointed out that Putin’s efforts to protect these companies have made these losses add up to 8% of GDP, and most of these companies are caused by Controlled by his former colleagues and neighbors.

“Eighty percent of things don’t allow small nee. This is a large number.”

However, other analysts expressed doubts about this figure.

Ukrainian analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera: “The direct losses are insignificant.” He said that the losses caused by the sanctions accounted for only one percent of Russia’s GDP.

However, he said that bilateral trade between Russia and Ukraine fell from a peak of nearly 50 billion U.S. dollars in 2011, and lost at least 20 billion U.S. dollars a year.

Ukraine is the second most populous republic of the former Soviet Union with a population of 43 million. It is Russia’s main trading partner and a source of labor immigration, food, steel and high-tech products.

Dozens of Ukrainian factories and research facilities serving the Russian military-industrial complex and the space industry severed the connection overnight, thereby increasing the cost of new weapons and spacecraft.

An expert said that Western sanctions on annexation include a ban on the export of advanced technology, which has paralyzed Russia’s already troubled aerospace industry.

Pavel Luzin, a Russian analyst at the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank in Washington, D.C., told Al Jazeera: “They have severely slowed down the development of the Russian space program.”

Beef water

Many in Crimea support the annexation because Moscow has pledged to increase wages and pensions, build better roads and promote tourism.

But these days, prices are soaring, corruption And the upward spiral of pressure on any form of dissent, made them wonder why they voted to “join” Russia in the March 2014 “referendum”, a decision that has not yet been recognized in Ukraine or internationally.

“In order to reduce people’s restlessness, [Moscow] Huge amounts of money must be spent to solve their problems,” Nikolay Poritsky, the former Ukrainian Minister of Housing and Public Services in Crimea, told Al Jazeera.

Life under Russian rule has become complicated.

A butcher living on the outskirts of Simferopol, the administrative capital of Crimea, said that after the annexation, he lost the opportunity to buy Ukrainian meat products and it took several months to find a reliable supplier in southern Russia.

After the first purchase, the supplier tried to sell him low-quality frozen beef.

“He said,’You live far away and may not come back again. I have to feed my family.'” The butcher, who asked not to be named, told Al Jazeera.

Now, he only opens a store to sell chicken once a week because the demand is too low.

In Crimea, there is another imminent catastrophe waiting for those people in the family.

The most famous place in Crimea is the southern coast. This is a subtropical, postcard-perfect verdant land full of hotels, resorts and former residences of the highest leaders of the Communist Party and the Russian tsars.

However, most of the peninsula is dry grassland and mountains.

The North Crimea Canal built by the Soviet Union provided 85% of the water from the mighty Dnieper River, which made irrigated agriculture and population growth possible.

Ukraine closed the canal in 2014, Almost disappeared Crimea’s agriculture has forced the de facto authorities to quantify the water supply in the city centre.

Today, Simferopol, the second largest city on the Crimean Peninsula, supplies water for 3 hours a day on weekdays and 5 hours on weekends. The residents of the apartment building rushed to fill up the bathrooms.

The water drawn from depleted reservoirs and contaminated wells is sometimes dirty.

“I took a bath and the water was the color of brandy,” Edem Kurtveliyev, a doctor who lives in a nine-story apartment building south of Simferopol, told Al Jazeera.

The de facto authorities announced millions of projects to pump water from aquifers, but admitted that the only long-term solution to the water crisis is to build expensive desalination plants.

“Desalination is the only way out,” Sergey Aksyonov, the pro-Russian head of Crimea, told the RIA Novosti news agency in December.

Four months later, he compared Ukraine’s refusal to reopen the canal with “state terrorism” and “genocide.”