Yalta

The lockdown restrictions in place combined with the Christmas break offer a rare opportunity for some reading. I recently finished a great book on the Yalta Conference before picking up a biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Yalta Club, which has organised the SOLAR Summer festival at Sunny Beach's Cacao Beach Club for the past ten years, announced on Tuesday that the event will not go ahead this year because of the uncertainty caused by recent raids.

The well-known Serbian director Emir Kusturica arrived today on the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia from Ukraine, to give a concert with his group "Smoking forbidden".They will play together in Yalta.

"I know there are wonderful landscapes and pretty girls in Yalta," he told journalists on his arrival at the regional capital, Simferopol, quoted by RIA Novosti.

SNP party leader Nenad Popovic and "several Serbian businesspeople" have been invited to an economic forum in Yalta next month.

Leader of Crimea Republic Serge Aksyonov announced this on Facebook, a week after his meeting with Popovic.

This year's 12-th edition of the SOLAR SUMMER festival will take place in the course of seven consecutive weekends at the newly constructed Cacao Beach Club.

Russia on Feb. 5 defied anger by unveiling a controversial monument to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Britain's Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt at their fateful meeting in Crimea in 1945.
      

A subsidiary of Austrian Raiffeisen Bank International has said it will close all offices in Crimea by mid-April.

According to a statement of the bank, as cited by international news agencies and Sega daily, the last 6 of the total of 32 offices of the bank in Crimea will be closed by April 15.

McDonald's has suspended work at its restaurants in Crimea for "manufacturing reasons", the U.S. fast food chain said on Friday. 

This is the second international company to cease operations this week on the peninsula annexed by Russia.