SIMFEROPOL, UKRAINE — When Crimea’s two million people wake up Monday after likely having voted in Sunday’s snap referendum to break with Ukraine in favor of joining the Russian Federation they will quickly feel the impact in their pockets from the secession and will endure months of economic disorder, say analysts.

‘It is going to be a long and painful process and the chaos is going to hit and cost ordinary people hard,” says Panchenko Hryorovych, a professor at Crimea’s Economics Institute, a branch of the Kyiv headquartered National University.

A lack of planning for how the region will manage the split with Ukraine – how Ukrainian state property will be handled, whether Ukraine will be compensated on assets losses or when existing private-sector business contracts have to be re-written to comply with Russian law – will compound the turmoil, he says.

No plan for the future

Russian and Crimean officials have discussed none of the economic or legal repercussions of breaking with Ukraine apparently. On March 14 at a press conference in Simferopol, Crimea’s newly installed Russian separatist Prime Minister, Sergei Aksyonov, said that all the technical details will be examined by working groups meeting in Moscow following today’s vote on a break-up.

An […]