tinyurl.com/mubw95f
“While Western headline-writers are telling us Russian troops are moving into Ukraine, in reality they are moving into Crimea – which is not the same thing. While Crimea is officially an autonomous region formally within Ukraine, it has its own Parliament and, up until 1995, its own President. The majority of Crimeans are Russian-speakers, and they have voted repeatedly for close relations with Russia. Crimea’s post-Soviet history is a rocky one. Unilaterally handed over to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 – in a move of dubious legality – Crimea was caught between Russia and Ukraine as the old USSR collapsed. In 1991, the Movement for a Republic of Crimea gathered 180,000 signatures on a petition calling for a popular referendum on Crimean independence, an informal “opinion poll” was held in which the modified demand for close relations with Russia passed overwhelmingly, and the elected Parliament adopted a resolution declaring Crimean sovereignty.”
“Kiev responded to this with the threat of force, and at that point the bargaining began. The Crimeans, for their part, used the separatist threat to gain some leverage in the negotiations with Kiev: what they wanted – and got – was control over local resources, which were about to be “privatized” by the crooks in Kiev and looted by various Western Ukrainian oligarchs. The local oligarchs took exception to this, and in the end they won out: Kiev basically caved and the resulting compromise kept Crimea within Ukraine, albeit with full economic and political autonomy. The compromise, however, didn’t last long: in 1993, as the Ukrainian economy collapsed, the Ukrainian currency approached worthlessness, and the social fabric of what was essentially an administrative unit of the old Soviet Union rather than an actual nation came apart at the seams, a national movement for Crimean independence gained traction. The presidential and parliamentary elections of 1994 gave Yuri Meshkov, a Russian nationalist, a big majority and a subsequent referendum on closer ties with Russian won nearly 80 percent of the vote. Kiev went ballistic, and Meshkov appealed to the Russians for protection, but President Yeltsin was more interested in appeasing the West and the Crimeans were ultimately left to fend for themselves. The Crimean presidency was abolished by unilateral decree of the Ukrainian Rada, and troops from Western Ukraine were sent in.”
“That same year, Yeltsin signed a tripartite agreement with Ukraine and the US, in which the Ukrainians agreed to give up their nuclear weapons – left over from the old Soviet days – with the secret protocols (never made public to this day) widely believed to guarantee Western support for Ukraine in the event of a threat to its arbitrarily-defined borders. Yet the Crimean desire to be free of the Ukrainian yoke did not abate: in 2008, the Crimean Parliament voted to recognize Abhkazia and Ossetia, two former Soviet autonomous regions that had been arbitrarily handed over to Georgia and subsequently voted to rejoin Russia. That same year, one million Crimeans signed a petition demanding the Russian fleet be allowed to retain its presence in Sevastopol. In spite of threats of force, and a series of heavy-handed administrative measures, Crimean separatism has continuously bubbled just beneath the surface, and polls show the majority of Russian-speakers and Ukrainian-speakers favor separation. This desire to get away has no doubt been amplified a thousand-fold as a coalition of corrupt oligarchs and outright fascists with US support overthrew Viktor Yanukovich, the elected President, and the country teeters on the edge of bankruptcy and chaos.”
“With officials of the ultra-rightist Svoboda party – formerly the “Social National” party – in top positions in the new government in Kiev, and with the outright neo-Nazis of “Right Sector” being handed control of police and law enforcement bodies, Crimeans are refusing to recognize Kiev’s authority. The Crimean Parliament has – once again – declared independence and appealed to Russia for security guarantees, while the head of the Ukrainian navy, which is stationed in Sevastopol, has defected to the Crimean side. The real story of what is happening in Ukraine is somewhat more complicated than the little morality play now being staged by the “mainstream” Western media. But then again there’s nothing new in that: the role of the American press as loyal servitor of the State has been repeatedly confirmed in recent years, from the Iraq fiasco to the demonization of Edward Snowden.”
