THE STRUGGLE FOR CRIMEA - December 13, 2008

Except for territorial adjacency, Crimea has nothing in common with the Ukraine proper and has never been Ukrainian in its history before. The Crimean Peninsula was originally colonized by ancient Greeks who named it Taurida [the Latin Tauria]. After the Mongolo-Tartar invasion of the 13th century, the peninsula had been inhabited by the Crimean Tartars, who gave it the present name [Kyrym in Turkish, or Krym in Russian]. In 1478 their Crimean Khanate became an autonomous vassal of the Ottoman Empire. In the course of numerous Russo-Turkish wars Crimea was annexed in 1783 into the Russian Empire and remained there until 1921, when Lenin formed the Crimean ASSR within the RSFSR. In 1944 Stalin deported all the Tartars to Central Asia for their collaboration with the German occupation of Crimea during the Second World War and abolished their autonomy.

After the death of Stalin, however, his successor Nikita Khrushchev (an ethnic Ukrainian) ceded Crimea in 1954 from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR, ostensibly in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of reunification of Russia and Ukraine. At that time, when disintegration of the Soviet Union was unthinkable, the formal detachment of Crimea from Russia was not a matter of concern for its Russian inhabitants. After the dissolution of the USSR though, when the independent Ukraine took with itself Crimea away from Mother Russia, this severance provoked disagreeable predicaments in the life of its Russian population.

The local Russians formed a political party named the Russian Bloc, whose leader, Vladimir Tunin, asserted: “We categorically say that Crimea should -- and I have no doubt shall be -- a part of Russia. On this Russian territory the Ukrainian government is committing ethnocide by trying to force people to speak in Ukrainian, imposing Ukrainian schools, showing television programs only in Ukrainian, and forcing the Russians to assimilate into their culture. But this is Russia! We want nothing to do with the Ukraine. Ukrainian officials oppress our people. They take orders from America. There could be fighting, but I am not worried if that is the way it has to be.”

Crimea has a special significance in Russian hearts as the place where the Russian Empire fought against the coalition of Britain, France and Turkey in the Crimean War of 1853-1856, and where the Red Army fought one of its bloodiest battles in 1941-1942, when German troops besieged the main Soviet navy base of Sevastopol. A magnificent building near the port displays a panoramic exposition of that epic. Local Russians speak proudly about the heroic defense of Sevastopol against the Turkish, British, French and German forces. And after so much blood shed by the Russian soldier for Crimea, they believe it belongs to Russia alone, and that Ukraine “has stolen” this historic part of Russia.

Sevastopol has been home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet for 225 years. Since the annexation of Crimea in 1783, Sevastopol grew as the headquarters of the Russian Imperial Navy on the Black Sea vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire. This tradition continued during the Soviet era, when Sevastopol headquartered the Soviet Black See Fleet, which was also active in the Mediterranean on a permanent basis. The presence of Russian Navy reinforces the local Russian population’s feeling that Crimea is part of Russia. Thousands of Russian sailors and soldiers stroll around the city, and huge Russian flags fly above the naval headquarters and other buildings.

The Mediterranean climate of Crimea, with its magnificent scenery of mountains, cozy coves and beaches, which inspired the Russian artists, made the peninsula a popular vacation destination for millions of Russians and a favored place of retirement for the Soviet elite. This combination has created there, since 1991, a vitriolic blend of Russian nationalism and Soviet nostalgia among the local population. The level of hatred against anything Ukrainian there is astonishing: people are attacked in the street for merely speaking Ukrainian. Around the turn of the century, the holiday business revived in Crimea with an explosion of hotels, restaurants and other leisure industries. Much of them are owned by Russian businessmen and provide another, purely pragmatic, motive for annexation disguised in nationalist rhetoric.

One million ethnic Russians live presently in Crimea, along with 500,000 Ukrainians and 300,000 Tartars. This preponderance is reflected in the election of local authorities which are openly more loyal to Moscow than to Kiev. Although the Ukrainian government has cracked down on Russian irredentism in the 1990s, Crimea remains autonomous, with a degree of self-government. Russia’s intervention in Georgia rekindled the separatist sentiment in Crimea. When the Russian warships that took part in the blockade of Georgia returned to Sevastopol, thousands of Russians greeted them with gun salutes and fireworks, while smaller groups with Ukrainian flags called out that they were aggressors. On 17 September 2008, the local assembly in Crimea’s capital Simferopol voted to urge Ukraine’s national parliament, Verkhovna Rada, to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

This peninsula is not the only region of Ukraine where ethnic Russians outnumber Ukrainians, but it has long been a source of tension between the two countries. Most of the Crimean Russians and many prominent politicians in Moscow have never reconciled themselves to the notion of an independent Ukraine, let alone a Ukrainian Crimea. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol is leased from Ukraine until 2017. But the Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko says he will not renew the lease, while Moscow has made it clear that it is determined to stay. Although Russia proceeds with construction of a new naval base on Russian territory in the port of Novorossiysk, its harbor is less suitable and occupies a less favorable geographic position than Sevastopol: there is simply no better place for a naval base in the entire Black Sea.

Ukraine could be the next country, after Georgia, to feel the military might of a resurgent Russia. The Western-leaning Yushchenko has been strident in his support of Georgia since the Russian incursion there and traveled to Tbilisi during the war to publicly demonstrate his solidarity. After the Russian navy vessels sailed from Sevastopol to attack Georgian ports, Yushchenko ordered restrictions on Russian warship movements in Ukrainian territorial waters. The new regulations demand that Russia asks for a permission ten days before its vessels enter or leave Sevastopol. That, coupled with Kiev’s determination to join NATO and the European Union, has further enraged Moscow.

Yushchenko should not make the threats that he practically cannot fulfill. The Ukrainian Navy, which is also headquartered in Sevastopol with its one serviceable battleship, is tiny and could not stop the Russians. Sailors in Ukrainian uniforms are often insulted and attacked in the city. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet includes 50 warships and smaller vessels, the aircraft include 80 planes and helicopters. There are 13,000 of other Russian servicemen stationed in Sevastopol, and effectively Crimea is already occupied. Moscow is just looking for an excuse to stir up the locals in Crimea, and the Ukrainian restrictions on Russian naval operations may just be the reason.

Russian nationalists in Crimea and Moscow, led by the mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov, have frequently called for the Kremlin to annex the peninsula, and not only by military means, but through an economic pressure on the cash-strapped Ukraine. Russia has been relentlessly ratcheting up the natural gas export cost for Ukraine in recent years, sparking a series of bitter pricing disputes between the two governments. Ukraine, which is heavily dependent on Russian energy supplies, currently pays $180 per 1000 cubic meters of gas, which is still significantly less than the $500 for European Union members, leaving so much leverage for Moscow to dictate its terms to Kiev in further negotiations. A.Miller, chairman of the Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom, said on 21 November 2008 that the price of Russian gas for Ukraine might rise to $400 per 1000 cubic meters after 1 January 2009.

On 2 October 2008, speaking outside Moscow after the gas price talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Putin accused Ukraine of selling weapons to Georgia that were used against the Russian troops. Russian officials have long claimed that Ukraine armed Georgia in the run-up to the war. The Russian daily Izvestia (Moscow) on 2 October 2008 implicated Yushchenko in its report on supplying Ukrainian air-defense systems and rocket launchers to Georgia. Putin said that Ukraine might also have dispatched military personnel to fight on the Georgian side during the conflict. Tymoshenko, who is engaged in a power struggle with her former ally Yushchenko, deflected responsibility for the arms sales. She said it was the president, not her own cabinet, that oversaw the deal, and pledged that a parliamentary commission would investigate the allegations.

The presence on the peninsula of Crimean Tartars, who are returning from their exile in Central Asia, makes the situation even more volatile. The local authorities in Crimea, dominated by ethnic Russians, are hostile to the returnees, most of whom live in shantytowns without electricity or running water. There have been bloody brawls between the Russians and Tartars, but no widespread violence so far. The danger is that some frustrated Tartars might take up weapons from radical Muslims. If they attack the Russians, Moscow will have its excuse to annex Crimea by contending that Ukraine was unable to protect the Russian citizens or merely ethnic Russians.

The overwhelming majority of people in Crimea would like to have Russian citizenship. Reports that thousands of Russian passports have already been distributed on the peninsula alarmed Kiev that an Ossetian scenario is in the offing for Crimea. (Ossetians had Russian citizenship prior to the Russian intervention). Ukrainian law forbids dual nationality and considers all of Crimea’s population Ukrainian citizens, but the situation here is slightly different from South Ossetia, which had already been de facto independent before the Russian incursion. Russia has already amended its constitution to give itself the right to militarily intervene on behalf of ethnic Russians wherever they might be harmed in a former Soviet republic. This evokes Hitler’s excuse for helping the ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland as justification for the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Speaking to a crowd in central Kiev on Independence Day, 24 August 2008, President Yushchenko said: “We must speed up our work to achieve membership in the European security system and raise the defense capabilities of the country. Only these steps will guarantee our security and the integrity of our borders.” Ukraine seems very vulnerable to a possible Russian aggression. It needs to attain membership in an organization that will give it strong international security guarantees. The United Nations and the Council of Europe are just a diplomatic palaver. Ukraine needs to join the European Union and NATO, but the prospect of that still looks distant.

At the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Yushchenko expressed his concern to Western leaders that Russia threatens to use force in settling its territorial disputes with Ukraine. However, on the matter of Ukrainian and Georgian membership, Germany and France were reluctant to give a clear signal that the two countries would be admitted into NATO. That decision emboldened Russia to strike against Georgia in August 2008. At the next NATO Council meeting in Brussels, the US government conceded on 3 December 2008 that the NATO membership for both former Soviet republics is to be postponed indefinitely.

To formulate all the circumstances mentioned above, Moscow has presently three options for its justification of a possible annexation of Crimea:

1) Enforcement by Ukrainian authorities of their restrictions on the movements of Russian Navy around Sevastopol and, ultimately, a military collision ensuing from Kiev’s refusal to let the Black Sea Fleet stay in Sevastopol beyond 2017, which Moscow has already rejected;

2) Coercive Ukrainization or any other instigation against the local Russians, who constitute the already existing Crimean autonomy, may provoke them to declare independence and ask for a Russian military intervention to protect the ethnic Russians or Russian citizens in a Kosovo/Ossetian scenario;

3) Peaceful acquisition of Crimea in a possible bargain based on forgiving all the Ukrainian debts incurred for the past and future Russian energy supplies, especially in the course of current financial crisis, when Ukraine is on the verge of economic collapse.

Dr. Alec Rasizade

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Dr. Alec Rasizade holds Ph.D. degree in Modern History from Moscow State University and M.A. degree from Azerbaijan State University. He is presently a Senior Associate at the Historical Research Center in Washington, D.C. Dr. Rasizade used to be a lecturer at many universities, including Stanford University and Columbia University. Prior to that he worked at Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.

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