“Pocket architect of the Kremlin”. The Foreign Ministry said the leaders of the Austrian architecture office will be banned from entering Ukraine.

Ukraine will not tolerate the blatant disregard for its sovereignty by the Austrian architectural office Coop Himmelblau, which is involved in the construction of an opera house in occupied Simferopol.

Oleksiy Makeev, the special representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine on sanctions policy, announced this on Facebook on December 5.

He reported that the previous day, at the request of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Office of the Prosecutor of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea opened a criminal proceeding against representatives of Coop Himmelblau.

“Ukraine has also put in place internal procedures to impose sanctions against the bureau for cooperation with the Russian occupation administration and complicity in an attempt to legitimize Russia’s annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea,” said the special representative of the Ministry of Relations. Exteriors.

He called on responsible foreign and Ukrainian companies to abandon joint projects with Coop Himmelblau.

“The management of this Austrian company decided to stand firm. They will be banned from Ukraine and the international reputation of this company will suffer serious losses.” it will remove the stigma of the “pocket architect of the Kremlin,” Makeev concluded.

The opera house is being built on Cape Khrustalny in Simferopol. The Crimea.Realities project reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin was the initiator of the project to build an opera house at Cape Khrustalny in Sevastopol in 2018. The client for the works is the National Cultural Heritage Foundation. They intend to complete construction in the second quarter of 2023, the total investment is about 25 billion rubles. (about $ 331 million).

Prix ​​said in a comment to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung that it doesn’t matter who to build, but what to build is important, as this is “a cultural building, not a barracks” and the client “is not Putin, but the Federation. Russian “.

Ukraine’s ambassador to Austria Alexander Shcherba said the office lied for a long time about its alleged lack of involvement in the construction, both to the Ukrainian and Austrian authorities.

“As I understand it, the reaction [Австрии] not very different from ours: disappointment, surprise that an architect recognized in the world decided to be part of a dirty history ”, explained the ambassador.

Russia annexed Crimea following an illegal referendum on March 16, 2014. Ukraine and most of the world’s countries do not recognize the peninsula’s accession to the Russian Federation. At the moment, there is a checkpoint regime between mainland Ukraine and Crimea, and Kiev does not de facto control the peninsula.

In connection with the occupation of the peninsula, several countries, including members of the European Union and the United States, have introduced sanctions against Russia.