Russian "green men" patrolling the airport in Simferopol, the capitol of Crimea, February 2014. Russian military occupied the peninsula almost a month in advance of the illegal "referendum."
Yesterday, Heorhiy Tuka, Ukraine’s deputy minister for the affairs of the occupied territories, said on 112 Ukraina TV that he “considers the return of Crimea in the next three to five years impossible,” a declaration which some are certain to denounce as pessimistic.
However painful it may be, Tuka continued, it is important to face facts and the facts in this case are these: “Crimea will again be [de facto as well as de jure] be part of Ukraine when “centrifugal forces arise again out of the economic crisis” that country is already facing.
“Now,” Tuka said, “this may seem drivel and fantastic, but one should look again at the news tapes of the mid-1990s, at how things developed in Kaliningrad, in Tatarstan and in Bashkortostan … and then Chechnya exploded. We all have seen this with our own eyes” and we should not forget it.
And he continued by asserting that “if the world community does not reduce its pressure on Russia, we will observe all of this in the next five to ten years.”
Tuka’s argument deserves close attention because it calls attention to something that many in Moscow and elsewhere have forgotten about one precedent that many are now invoking about Ukraine’s Crimea – the West’s consistent non-recognition of the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Between the time that policy was proclaimed in Washington in 1940 and the recovery of Baltic independence in 1991 passed 51 years, but at various points during that period, some in the Soviet hierarchy worried that the Baltic aspirations for the recovery of their legitimate independence would have an unhealthy influence on the non-Russian republics.
Some even thought, especially in Gorbachev’s time, that it would be better to allow the Baltic countries to go their own way before their ideas spread to Ukraine and elsewhere. That was certainly Academician Sakharov’s position, but it was shot down by Mikhail Gorbachev who wanted to hold everything and as a result lost everything.
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- Ribbons with names of kidnapped Crimeans are hung at the Russian embassy. (Photo: Olena Makarenko)
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- French MPs pay homage to a monument to Russian invaders in Crimea
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- At first, Putin claimed there were the “little green men” in Crimea, not the Russian military, as he admitted a year later. Russian special services troops besieging a Ukrainian military base in Crimea, February 2014. (Image: UNIAN)
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- Russia’s FSB arriving to search the house of Deputy Chairman of the Mejlis of Crimean Tatar people Ilmi Umerov, who was arrested on fabricated charges. About 30 agents were brought to the search. Bakhchysarai, Crimea, May 12, 2016 (Image: video capture)
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- A Putin billboard in Crimea says: “Crimea. Russia. Forever.” (Image: sobytiya.info)
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- Russian occupation forces and mercenaries subdue and escort away a Crimean resident before assaulting the Belbek airbase, outside Sevastopol, Crimea, on March 22, 2014. (Image: AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)
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- A propagandist mural of Putin in occupied Yalta, Crimea sported a hashtag “#НАШ” ( Russian for “ours”) to claim that Crimea is now Russian. The graffiti by Crimean residents that quickly covered it disagreed with the Kremlin statement and expressed what they think about Putin’s Crimean Anschluss. May 2015 (Image: social networks).
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- Troops of the Russian occupation force on parade in Sevastopol, Crimea on May 9, 2016 (Image: sevas.com)
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- Occupation: Armed servicemen stand near Russian army vehicles in Crimea.
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- Russian FSB secret police and paramilitaries suppress any open dissent in Crimea and actively search for any hidden resistance to the occupation. Beside using the judicial system to enforce the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian peninsula, they employ secret abductions and extrajudicial killings of Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian activists. (Image: GordonUA.com)
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- So-called “little green men” (the Russian occupation troops comprised of special forces who removed insignia, wear face masks to prevent identification and call themselves a “Crimean self-defense force”) surround a Ukrainian military base in Perevalne, Crimea, during the Russian annexation of the peninsula in February-March 2014.
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- A heavily-protected Russian entry point into the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea annexed by Russia in March 2014 (Image: Kommersant.ru)
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- A commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Crimean Tartar departation from Crimea by the Soviet government. Simferopol, Crimea, Russia-occupied territory of Ukraine, 2014. (Image: Reuters)
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- The sign in Kaluga, Russia says “Crimea Today – Rome Tomorrow! Happy Victory Day of May 9!” (Image: KP-Kaluga, May 2015)
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- Putin speaking in occupied Sevastopol on the anniversary of the WW2 Victory Day to celebrate Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine conducted by his military and special forces two months earlier. May 9, 2014 (Image: kremlin.ru)
A more serious, if less well-known, example of fears in Moscow about a Baltic contagion occurred in the late 1940s when Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, quietly explored the idea of allowing the Baltic countries to go their own way as Soviet-controlled “peoples republics” like the East Europeans outside of the USSR.
Beria went so far as to have his agents contact Baltic officials to compose lists of who might be the senior officials in such nominally independent countries, and he certainly believed that allowing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to go their own way in this limited sense would ease East-West tensions sufficiently to undercut American plans for NATO.
Not surprisingly, when Beria was purged, he was condemned for his supposed contacts with foreign intelligence services, almost certainly untrue, and his support of non-Russian nationalists, something that was very much the case in the Baltic states and elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
At least some in Putin’s Moscow today know this record and recognize the dangers involved in holding on to Crimea, although Vladimir Putin may be confident that he can do there what Stalin and his successors in the Baltic countries could not because of the differences in demographics and history.
But as conditions deteriorate in the Russian Federation because of Western sanctions over Crimea and the Donbas, some in the Russian elites may conclude that they have an additional reason to give back what Putin stole: Not only would that end sanctions and ease their lives but it would put off, for a time at least, the disintegration of their country.
To see why that is so, they need look no further than to the late 1980s when Gorbachev and the last Soviet government failed to recognize the way in which aspirations for freedom and justice in one part of an empire can spread and prove fatal for that empire as a whole, if not overnight then at least in the fullness of time.
Related:
- Hague Court rules against Moscow on Crimea, so Moscow withdraws from Rome Agreement
- UN committee adopts resolution recognizing Russia as occupying power in Crimea
- Expert community outraged over new FSB arrests in Crimea
- Crimea, Donbas, Aleppo — crimes of historic proportions
- Russia bans Crimean Tatars by banning the Mejlis
- Don’t forget those kidnapped in occupied Crimea
- Umerov case highlights why Crimean Anschluss a threat to Russians, Portnikov says
- Crimea’s occupied cultural heritage
- Putin’s Crimean miscalculation
Tags: Crimea, International, Putin, Putin regime, Russia, Russia's Anschluss of Crimea, Russian disintegration
