ABSTRACT
Crimea When the coup attempt looked fragile early on, WMM speculated that Kiev could sever Western Ukraine as a separate entity. Concerns that later caused such anguish when Crimea and the Donbass fought for separation or autonomy were not in evidence (Nazemroaya 2014a). The New York Times instead smeared the movement for Crimean secession (Parry 2014k). The New York Times correspondent C.J. Chivers co-authored a dispatch with Patrick Reevel titled “Pressure and Intimidation Grip Crimea,” with the subtitle, “Russia Moves Swiftly to Stifle Dissent Ahead of Secession Vote.” The journalists alleged Russian intimidation, military occupation, and electoral manipulation ahead of the referendum on March 16 (Chivers and Reevel 2014). In various reports, the New York Times and other WMM suggested that Russia had “invaded” Crimea. They attached little importance to the fact that Moscow already had 16,000 troops stationed in Crimea under agreement with Ukraine allowing Russia to maintain up to 25,000 troops to protect its historic naval base at Sebastopol. Russian troops did support the Supreme Council of Crimea as preparations were under way for a referendum that soon demonstrated overwhelming public support for secession (Chivers and Reevel 2014; Parry 2014l). This predictable result owed little or nothing to Russian “occupation” or electoral “manipulation,” and much to long-standing ambivalence towards Kiev among a strong majority of Crimeans, especially among ethnic Russians. Greta Uehling, whose perspective was influenced by her studies of the Crimean Tatars, offered a less fulsome account claiming, without sources, that Russian troops “took over” the Supreme Council, installing pro-Russian Prime Minister Sergei Aksyono whom she asserts had criminal ties, and that the Council then held a referendum (Uehling 2015). The criminal ties are disputed (Der Spiegel reported mafia connections, but based on German intelligence documents; cf. Bidder 2014). Ukraine condemned the Russian annexation to the UN General Assembly. Its resolution called on member countries not to recognize the redrawing of Ukraine’s borders. This was passed on March 26, 2015 by 100 votes to eleven, with fifty-eight abstentions. The abstentions included Bolivia, China, India, Israel, Lebanon and South Africa. UN resolutions of this
kind lack enforcement power and are frequently ignored by major powers, including the USA which routinely ignores resolutions condemning Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Two weeks before the referendum, Vladimir Putin acknowledged that Russian troops present in Crimea would resist its occupation by Ukraine’s coup regime, in support of the wishes of the Crimean people. WMM negativity persisted into early 2015 when the New York Times reported a claim from the opposition Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta that the conservative Russian oligarch Konstantin V. Malofeev provided the Kremlin with advance warning of the Yanukovych government collapse in February 2014 and counseled Russia to exploit the ensuing chaos by annexing Crimea and South Eastern Ukraine while offering in justification the EU’s own rules on self-determination. The New York Times report had no evidence of such a memo, nor evidence that it had been applied for policy purposes. Its existence was denied by both the Kremlin spokesman and by Malofeev. Its contents did not square well with Russia’s actual behavior: (1) caution on the question of Crimea, where it acted only until after a Crimean referendum confirmed broad popular support for annexation; and (2) refusal to annex other regions discontented with the coup regime, despite persistent local appeals to Russia to do so (MacFarquhar 2015). Evidence of a strong pro-Russian tendency (including also a separatist tendency) in Crimea, where Russia’s presence dated to the early 1700s was abundant. Crimea formally became a part of Russia in 1784. The province had previously formed part of Crimean Khanata of the Tatars, sometimes said by Tatars today to have been one of the strongest and most independent powers of Eastern Europe even though it was absorbed within the Ottoman Empire. This prior history sustained the ethnic nationalism of the anti-Russian Crimean Tatars, whose hostility dated to Stalin’s wholesale deportation of the Tatars to Central Asia in 1946 (40 percent died in the journey). This was said to be punishment for alleged Tatar collaboration with Germany in World War II. There were no Tatars in Crimea in 1959, and they constituted only 12 percent (200,000) of the population in 2001. Of these, perhaps 20 percent considered themselves aligned to the Tatar’s Mejlis parliament which claimed to speak on behalf of all Tatars. Tatars were only able to repatriate in substantial numbers after 1991 and in 2014 represented a struggling Crimean minority. During 2015, Tatars allied with Ukrainian nationalists in support of actions to sabotage energy, trade and transportation links between Ukraine and Crimea. Ukrainians comprised 24 percent of the population of Crimea in 2001. Fifty-eight percent of Crimea’s two million people in 2001 claimed to be Russians and 77 percent were registered as native Russian-speakers (Sakwa 2015: 13; Lubin 2014). An absolute majority of Crimeans (97 percent) spoke Russian as their main language, according to Kiev’s International Institute of Sociology (RT 2014a). Ethnic Russian Crimeans, particularly, reacted passionately against the revocation by Kiev’s new authorities of a law that legalized the regional use of minority languages, including Russian. This allowed Ukraine’s Russian-speaking regions to use Russian in official business and education. The
new government also proposed to prohibit members of the former regime from occupying official posts. Ethnic Russians in Crimea long resented Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s arbitrary 1954 transfer of their region to Ukraine. A strong pro-Russian separatist movement emerged in the early years of Ukrainian independence. Overtly proRussian separatist organizations, including the Communist Party of Crimea and the Party of Regions, did not do well in the mid-1990s elections, but separatism remained a significant possibility. Seventy-three percent of decided Crimeans in 2008 backed secession of Crimea from Ukraine and joining with Russia. The support for separatism increased after EuroMaidan (Katchanovski 2015a: 83-86). A 2015 poll indicated that 82 percent of Crimean people fully supported their region’s inclusion in Russia, while only 4 percent spoke out against it [Kelly 2015]). In March 2014, the Crimean government invited citizens to choose between staying part of Ukraine – but with greater autonomy – or joining Russia. Voter turnout was reportedly 80 percent, and the vote to join Russia was 97 percent [Roberts 2014b]). A report of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights later estimated the turnout to have been only between 30-50 percent, of whom 50-60 percent voted for unification with Russia, with a higher turnout of 50-80 percent in Sebastopol where the overwhelming majority voted in favor (Sakwa 2015: 104). Sakwa concluded that even in perfect conditions, a majority in Crimea would have voted for union with Russia and that in Sebastopol the favorable vote would have been overwhelming. In a Pew Research Center survey in April 2014, 91 percent of respondents in Crimea stated that the referendum was free and fair (Pew Research Center quoted by Katchanovski 2015a: 86). Large sections of Ukrainian military, security service and police personnel in Crimea switched their allegiance to the separatists and then to Russia. In the September 2014 elections, the United Russia party of President Putin won 71 percent of the votes in Crimea, although some opposition parties were constrained in how they were able to function at this time (Katchanovski 2015a: 86-87). Russia’s Kommersant newspaper reported the results of a survey of Crimeans conducted in November 13-16 by the Levada Center, an independent Russian pollster: it showed that 87 percent of respondents believed Crimea should be part of Russia. Only 3 percent thought the peninsula should be part of Ukraine (Annis 2015). These findings were consistent with the results published by several Western-funded polls in late 2014. The autonomous Rada of Crimea had long been at odds with Kiev. A movement to unify Russia and Crimea was of long standing. Crimea’s Rada passed anti-NATO legislation in 2006, banning NATO forces from entering Crimean territory (Nazemroaya 2014a). Writing for Forbes in March 2015, Kenneth Rapoza cited several surveys demonstrating that Crimeans of all stripes – ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Tartars – overwhelmingly wished to belong to Russia rather than be returned to Ukraine. The surveys included a June 2014 Gallup poll sponsored by the US government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors, and a February 2015 poll by Germany’s GfK (Rapoza 2015; Parry 2015b). One strong
practical reason for loyalty to Russia was that Russian pensions were three times higher than Ukrainian ones, and that Ukrainian pensions were being slashed in concession to IMF demands for austerity. A rare WMM attempt at full historical context was offered by the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, almost a year after Crimea voted for annexation with Russia (Hitchens 2015). In December 1991, the UN formally recognized Russia as the “continuer state,” which technically meant that everything that belonged to the Soviet Union came under Russian jurisdiction, including Sebastopol – “an object of all-union significance.” In January 1991, before Ukraine’s independence in August of that year, the government of Crimea held a referendum on Crimean autonomy. The vote in favor of autonomy was 93 percent of an 80 percent turnout. In March, 87 percent of Crimean voters voted to stay in the Soviet Union: they anticipated this would afford them greater independence than if they were incorporated within Ukraine. Shortly before the final collapse of the Soviet Union, Crimea’s parliament approved by 153 to 3 a measure that would enable the region to hold a referendum on its political future but the newly independent government of Ukraine, once in power, prohibited the referendum even though it had been requested by 246,000 of Crimea’s 2.5 million people. Moscow had done nothing to prevent Ukraine from declaring independence, nor protested Ukraine’s refusal to allow Crimea a referendum vote. President Yeltsin indicated that Russia would not let republics with large Russian populations secede from the newly emerging states of the former Soviet Union, but later backed down. When signatures for a referendum were being collected in 1992, Ukraine offered more autonomy for Crimea. Crimea’s parliament voted 118 to 28 for secession on May 5, subject to confirmation by referendum. This vote was reversed the following day amidst threats of bloodshed and direct presidential rule from Ukraine, and the carrot of greater autonomy. Ukraine declared the May 5 vote unconstitutional and plans for a referendum were canceled. WMM understated how events in Crimea were an inevitable response to Western meddling that had precipitated the collapse of the Yanukovych regime on February 22 (Smith 2014). Khrushchev’s 1954 gift of Crimea to Ukraine did not include Sebastopol, site of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. When Ukraine became independent following the Soviet Union’s collapse, territories that had previously been Russian but then appended to Ukraine by Soviet rulers were retained by Ukraine, under Washington pressure. In compensation, Russia was given a fifty-year lease on Sebastopol. Several legal justifications supported the Crimean referendum for annexation with Russia (Sakwa 2015: 108-110). Secession may have been unconstitutional under the constitution in force up to February 2014, but the February 2014 coup rendered that constitution null and void. Procedurally, the 1954 transfer of Crimea was not correct. Additionally, the port of Sebastopol, as an “object of all-union significance,” remained under Moscow’s control even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The principle of inviolability of borders, invoked with respect to the Russo-Ukrainian treaty of 1990, applied to administrative divisions within a single Soviet state, not to independent countries. The annexation
averted attacks against ethnic Russians of the peninsula that they had good reason to fear in the wake of the coup in Kiev and subsequent massacres in Odessa and the Donbass and in the context of long-standing dissatisfaction in Crimea with Ukrainian attempts to impose cultural hegemony. The rights of peoples to self-determination, finally, is a cardinal principle of modern international law. There were certainly problems with the circumstances in which the referendum was conducted: the presence of armed troops, the hurry with which the referendum was conducted, the absence of independent international observers and the lack of transparency in counting procedures. But if constitutional behavior had broken down in Kiev, there was no reason to preserve it in Crimea. In addition, the West had created numerous precedents that in a less partial environment would have required their support for the Crimean declaration: for example, Western support for Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, which was declared without even first staging a referendum. WMM had shown no insuperable doubts in accepting the basic legitimacy of an Iraqi election in 2005 which was conducted under extremely violent US-UK military occupation, press censorship and control, and vote rigging. Nor had WMM gagged in the face of Libya’s elections in 2012, conducted amidst the chaos and societal fragmentation that followed NATO intervention. Nor, again, in face of the Afghan presidential elections of 2014 carried out under equally non-propitious circumstances. Nonetheless WMM were adamant in their refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Crimea’s referendum which, they insisted, was conducted “at [Russian] gunpoint” (Edwards 2014) or because it was “under military occupation.” They refused to countenance comparisons between Russian action in Crimea and Western support for separatism elsewhere. In 1999, as we have seen, NATO had fought a war against what remained of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with the goal of militarily occupying Kosovo province and prying Kosovo away from Yugoslavia. No referendum on Kosovo’s separation from Yugoslavia was held (although, to be sure, the measure was broadly popular in Kosovo). By contrast, in their coverage of Ukraine, the word “unelected” was rarely attributed to the interim Kiev rulers, and the word “coup” was almost always used in quotes. The editors of the media monitoring website Media Lens identified the BBC’s pro-West stance, noting that BBC News “sticks to a propaganda framework which reflects the values and priorities of the UK government and wider western powers” (Cromwell and Edwards 2014). At its least pernicious, this took the form of headlining complaints from the UK Foreign Secretary William Hague or the US Secretary of State John Kerry that the “territorial integrity” of the Ukraine had been violated – a view conveniently and hyper-hypocritically unembellished by any reference to the West’s invasions, occupations and/or destabilizations of Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya, an omission that Cromwell and Edwards considered was bordering on “contempt for public memory and understanding of recent historical events.” The BBC, they believed, acted as though it was mandatory “to portray Russia largely as a threatening dangerous power in a manner
that the broadcaster does not do with the UK, the United States or NATO” (Cromwell and Edwards 2014). Equally missing from the repertoire of Ukraine coverage was the thorny issue of the approval by the UN’s 2010 International Court of Justice for the separation of Kosovo from Serbia. Kosovo had been a constituent part of Serbia for centuries and was internationally recognized as such from 1912. Because Kosovo had never been a Yugoslav republic, unlike the six actual Yugoslav republics, it had no right under international law to become an independent state (Kuzio 2015: 115). It is useful at this point to bear in mind the claim of French Brigadier-General and famous geo-strategist Pierre Marie Gallois, that the balkanization of Yugoslavia was planned much in advance by Germany and the United States in the 1970s, rather than at its actual occurrence in the 1990s (Shukla 2015). The USA was keen on this because it wanted NATO to continue in a post-Cold War world; it needed Europe to depend on it, militarily and wanted to humiliate Russia, testing its Slavic unity with Serbia. The former CIA agent and author Mike Bauer has claimed in an interview to have been assigned by the agency to missions in the former Yugoslavia whose purpose was to incite hatred between the republics and blame Serbia.
