None of these things work anymore in Crimea

KYIV, Ukraine — Moscow’s swift and widely condemned annexation of Crimea last year may have boosted patriotism in continental Russia, but life on the Black Sea peninsula isn’t exactly getting better.

In fact, a steady stream of recent news suggests Russia’s newest region faces growing financial and international isolation, thanks partly to Western sanctions against the Kremlin.

On Friday, major global payment company PayPal stopped servicing its Crimean clients, with the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda reporting customers’ accounts have been either blocked or frozen.

That’s only part of the unfortunate financial picture: Late last month, Visa and MasterCard both announced they would stop servicing local cardholders.

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Then there are the tech giants: Apple ceased product sales in the region this week and scrapped its contracts with local software developers, TechCrunch said Thursday; and Google has blocked some of its own services such as Google Play, Russian news outlet Lenta.ru reported Friday.

All that is certainly bad news for techies and any Crimean who relies on their plastic — or PayPal’s web-based equivalent — for payments.

But it gets downright grim for others.

Earlier this week, the United Nations’ AIDS envoy told journalists in Paris that up to 100 drug addicts in Crimea may have died from a lack of access to effective treatment, according to Agence France-Presse.

That’s because methadone, used by formerly Ukrainian-run clinics to wean addicts off heroin, is outlawed under Russian law.

“The causes of death, from what we have been hearing, are mainly from suicide and overdose,” AFP quoted envoy Michel Kazatchkine as saying.

Russian health officials denied that charge, claiming instead that drug-related deaths have decreased.

Whatever the case, that’s only added to the peninsula’s mounting problems since it joined Russia amid the fiercest geopolitical standoff between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.

By the end of last year, inflation was up an astonishing 42.5 percent, according to federal statistics. Meanwhile, the region’s tourism industry — its main economic lifeblood — suffered a major blow last year after would-be travelers were spooked away by potential turmoil.

But authorities appear to be taking it all in stride — or at least seem prepared for the consequences Russia’s fast-track annexation has brought.

Oleg Saveliev, the country’s Crimean affairs minister, told Bloomberg News late last month that “a great number of problems” still awaits the peninsula as it gets used to living in Russia’s orbit.

“For 23 years people lived in different legal systems, in different paradigms,” he said, "and now it is hard when in every nuance, in every spot there is a problem.”