The Tug of War Over the Crimea

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI]  Journal Pioneer

Some 25 million ethnic Russians were left adrift when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and was replaced by 15 different nations. They now found themselves living as minorities in newly-independent countries.

Included in this huge Russian diaspora are some 8.5 million people in Ukraine, about 17 per cent of the total population of 44 million. And in one region of the country, the Crimea, Russians make up 60 per cent of the population of two million. (The rest are Ukrainians, at 25 per cent, and Tatars, at 12 per cent.)

The Crimean peninsula, which juts out into the Black Sea from Ukraine, covers an area of more than 26,000 square kilometres. Virtually an island, it has been a bone of contention and an arena for war for centuries.

The Crimea was annexed by the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great in 1783, wrested from its Crimean Tatar inhabitants. It has been used as a beachhead from which to attack Russia, as was the case during the Crimean War of 1853-1856, when Britain and France went to war to protect the Ottoman Empire against Russian attempts at expansion.

It was captured by the Nazis in 1941 during the Second World War and retaken by the Soviets three years later. During his last years in power, the paranoid Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin even believed that the United States planned to invade the Soviet Union through the Crimea.

After Stalin’s death, the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1954 transferred the Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, today’s Russian Federation, to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, now the independent Ukraine.

It didn’t much matter back then, as the Soviet Union was, despite its formal ethno-federalism, really run from the Kremlin by the Communist Party. But it does matter now, since the Russian-majority population of the peninsula is cut off from Russia itself.

Today the Crimea is an autonomous republic within Ukraine, with its own constitution and 100-member parliament, which appoints the prime minister, currently Anatoliy Mohyliov. Politics continues to be dominated by the Russian majority. In the 2010 Crimean election, the pro-Russian Party of Regions won 80 seats.

The Crimea is also represented by 12 out of 225 single-member constituency seats in the Ukrainian parliament (the other 225 are elected by proportional representation). In the 2012 Ukrainian national election, the Party of Regions won all but one Crimean seat. Although Ukrainian is the official language of Ukraine, in the Crimean republic more than 77 per cent speak Russian, and government business in the capital of Simferopol is carried on mainly in Russian.

In 2009, anti-Ukrainian demonstrations were held by ethnic Russian residents, and the then deputy speaker of the Russian-dominated Crimean parliament said that he hoped that Russia would come to the aid of the Crimea in the same way as it had when it had helped the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia fend off the Georgian army a year earlier.

A year earlier, Ukraine’s foreign minister had accused Russia of giving out Russian passports to the population in the Crimea and described it as a “real problem.”

The Russian Black Sea fleet still uses the Crimean port of Sevastopol as its home base; the lease runs through 2042. Sevastopol, which is now home to a Ukrainian naval base as well, has an even higher proportion of ethnic Russians than the rest of the republic.

While Moscow does not publicly back Crimean separatists, it has declared that the rights of ethnic Russians in the Crimea must not be violated. The Crimea is now the setting for a political tug of war between Russians, Ukrainians, and even the small Tatar minority.