Honest History: To whom does Crimea belong?
By Bermet Talant . Published July 13. Updated July 13 at 10:51 am
http://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/honest-history-to-whom-does-crimea-belong.htmlTwo days after the Kremlin held a sham referendum at gunpoint in Crimea on March 16, 2014, in an attempt to justify the illegal annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed his nation.
“In hearts and in minds of the people, Crimea has always been and remains an integral part of Russia,” he said, falsely claiming that Crimeans had unanimously made a free choice to leave Ukraine and join Russia.
Ukraine and its Western allies called the Crimean referendum illegitimate because it came only weeks after Russian troops invaded and occupied the peninsula, installing pro-Kremlin authorities at the point of a gun. The ballot offered two choices for Crimea — to join Russia or to remain a part of Ukraine but under the Crimean Constitution of 1992, which meant more autonomy and Russian as the official language.
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Crimea had indeed formerly been part of Imperial Russia and then Soviet Russia. However, by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in 1954 Crimea was turned over to Ukraine, and it remained part of Ukrainian territory after the disintegration of the Soviet Union — until Putin said he would “restore historic justice” in 2014.
In the civilized world, Russia’s brazen invasion and occupation of Crimea is seen as the first attempt to redraw borders by force since World War II.
In addition, Russia violated a number of international laws and agreements, such as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the 1997 Treaty of Friendship between Russia and Ukraine, the 2003 Agreement on State Borders, and the Helsinki Accords.
Putin’s obsession with Crimea has roots in Russian czar Catherine the Great’s obsession with ancient Greece.
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After eight years of war, Russia and Ottoman Turkey in 1774 finally signed a peace treaty that formally declared Crimea an independent state, after three centuries under the Ottomans.
Moreover, Russia got control over two key seaports in the Black Sea, Azov and Kerch, and became the declared protector of all Orthodox Christians who lived in the Ottoman Empire.
“Initially, Catherine didn’t plan to annex the conquered territories to Russia. She wanted to expand the empire’s influence, not its borders,” wrote Zorin.
Instead, it was Russia’s military commander and Catherine’s favorite, Grigory Potemkin, who decided the fate of Crimea.
In the late autumn of 1782, he sent a handwritten note to the empress in which he persuaded her to annex the peninsula. In his words, Crimea’s geographical location gave Russia unimpeded access to the Black Sea and security on its borders with Turkey.
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The extensive Russification of Crimea started after World War II, and would not have been possible had the peninsula not been ethnically cleansed in 1944 on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The Crimean Tatars and other ethnic minorities were rounded up and deported to Central Asia, having been falsely accused of collaborating en masse with the Nazis.
In fact, Stalin’s repressions paved the way for Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea.
To justify the invasion, Putin announced that its transfer to Ukraine in 1954 was a violation of Soviet laws. He based his territorial claims on the preposterous allegation that there was a threat to the ethnic Russians living in Crimea, who made up the majority of the peninsula’s population. He said they faced forced assimilation and were being deprived of their native language by Ukrainian nationalists, whom Kremlin propaganda portrayed as “anti-Semite, Russophobe, neo-Nazi” thugs who had taken control of the country after President Viktor Yanukovych was toppled in the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014.
All these lies were used by Putin as a cover for the well-planned Russian operation to invade and occupy Crimea, which had obviously been prepared well ahead of the EuroMaidan Revolution, and which is part of Putin’s overarching goal of extending Russian control and influence in the “near abroad,” as the Kremlin calls the countries apart from Russia that were once part of the Soviet Union.
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Another common manipulation tool is to falsely claim there have been violations of the human rights of an ethnic Russian minority abroad, or discrimination against Russian speakers.
But as demonstrated by the subsequent Kremlin military intervention in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, in which over 10,300 have died, the biggest danger to Russian speakers living outside Mother Russia is in fact the Kremlin and its armies.
