The southern shore of Crimea was ruled directly by the Ottomans (not the vassalized Khanate), and most of the diversity was there (with similar policies, so that doesn't change the conclusions, I'm just nitpicking).
The argument from Crimea I hear in the version, "but the Russian minority in Ukraine is not treated properly and wants to Russia." Apparently this is what Ukrainian refugees claim, and Le Monde. I have tried to explain that the bad attitude towards Russians is a result of Russian politics and the war, that no democratic votes confirm support for Russia, and we only have reports that are heavily politically charged, and well, that the situation can be compared to the German minority in Poland, after Hitler unleashed the war. And that as long as the war continues, sympathizing with the minority from the aggressor nation and ignoring the rights of the invaded majority, is immoral. Well, but "they" do not understand what is being said to them....
The point I'm trying to make is that these people are not even a "minority". They are mostly Russian citizens who either came there after 2014, or never applied for Ukrainian citizenship in the first place, taking advantage of the special status of Sevastopol. I don't think they should have a say about the future of Crimea. It would be like allowing German occupiers to remain in France or Norway and happily vote for Petain or Quisling.
I agree with you, but I think the Crimea problem looks "simple" only if you think only until the eventual liberation. What comes after may well look pretty ugly, because Russia will pull every trick in the book to make the pro-Russia residents of Crimea (both those who lived there before 2014 and those who settled after the annexation) look as victims. They might even try to organise a guerilla movement there. When will Ukraine do then? Run its own West Bank show? Won't look too good on the EU membership application form...
Well, I think those who came after 2014 are literally illegal aliens, so their removal should be pretty straitghtforward. I don't believe in "Russian guerilla". We never saw anything like this, even in the rusophone cities like Odesa or Krivyi Rih. People declaring they are "pro Russian" are mostly "pro authority", when authority changes, they will change.
I expect Russia to make this as nasty as possible, e.g destroy the local archives before moving, so that Ukrainian citizens who lost their documents have it difficult to prove they're not illegal aliens. Or Russian settlers will start claiming they've actually lived in Crimea since 2010, for example. It's going to be fun.
I don't think it will be a major issue (especially compared to actual liberation). Ukraine did a great job digitizing its archives. If you ever had Ukrainian citizenship, it should be easy to prove. Even after years of occupation.
And if someone never did... well, they can only ask Ukrainian authorities for generous treatment, but actually they can be removed as undesired aliens.
One thing which I don't understand is why Turkey with all those Erdogan's words about uniting turkish nations is not involving itself more in Crimea and Tatars protection. BTW: I'm not sure if it's true but I've heard from one Turkish guy that there are more Tatars living in Turkey than in Crimea and Russia together. They would be natural candidates for peacekeepers after the war.
Turkey is a member of NATO. I certainly hope that Russia loses the war badly enough that they have to accept NATO peacekeepers in Crimea, but I wouldn't count on it.
We should not encourage Turkey to attempt to restore the Ottoman Empire, it will end in a similar tragedy as Putin's attempt to restore the Russian one.
"Turkey with all those Erdogan's words about uniting turkish nations"
Here is your problem: 1. Erdogan's. 2. Words.
Politicians, especially of this kind, will say anything when they need to justify their actions. The real question here is: how's the risk/reward looking?
"Current Russian propaganda is portraying this transfer as something sinister, erroneous, controversial, or even illegal (as if the decision of the party leaders could ever be illegal in a communist country!). This is a new phenomenon caused by looking for justification of the war - there was no controversy about it as far back as 10 years ago."
There was. According to Plokhy, already in the 90s the Russian parliament declared the transfer of Crimea illegal and claimed Sevastopol for the Russian Federation. Yeltsin also said that "Crimea is Russian" after hearing that it voted, like the rest of Ukraine, for indepence from the USSR. His vice president, Rutskoi, declared in 1992 that the transfer should be reversed. And so on.
I must say 30 years ago I would kind of agree with their claim to Sevastopol. "They built this city" (not of rock and roll, but of naval base). But this problem was solved by a treaty leasing the base to the Russian for decades and a special status of the whole city. By using the base in agression against Ukraine, Russians violated the treaty and I don't believe there will be "Russian Sevastopol" when the war ends.
Sevastopol is not valuable as a naval base for Russia now unless it somehow makes peace with Ukraine. You can't keep a naval base so close to a hostile country.
This improves Ukraine's negotiating position in any eventual talks, I think.
"If you feel that Crimean toponomics often sound like they are derived from Greek or Latin (Theodosia, Eupatoria, Taurida) it’s because they are."
One of the reasons why Russia is so obsessed with Crimea appears to be that it provides them with a "connection to the ancient greco-roman civilisation", thus lending some credibility to the "Third Rome" narrative. Obviously another example of megalomania and/or magical thinking, but still worth mentioning.
Ownership of the land is successful ethnic cleansing plus time.
Contrary to what many Ukrainians learn in school Poland didn't annex Western Ukraine in 1920, this is ahistoric as at the time both nations had reasonable claims (even if Poland get much more than it should) - but after most Poles were disappeared from there, no one sane in Poland treats these territories as polish in any sense except historical.
The same goes for Eastern Prussia or Western Pomerania.
Kosovo is historical heartland of Serbia but is today widely accepted as separate from Serbia because Albanians (just for simplicity, I know it's more complicated) settled and lived there long enough time ago that there is no point of reverting it.
Lets not even start considering Native Americans here.
Israel uses settlers in the hope of doing the same. After enough generations of settlers no deal to give some territory back to Palestine will be seen as sane.
There is not enough Crimean Tatars left and they are too dispersed arounf the world to make Crimea a Tatar state.
If putin didn't invade in 2022 he would probably have kept Crimea long enough, to make it impossible to take away - whether it would be 30 years or 75.
That's why I really hope, Ukraine will get back Crimea this time. Because with every decade it will be harder to justify.
The counter-argument could be Northern Ireland, though. The unification of NI with the Republic of Ireland is possible at any moment, arguably.
That's why I think that if Ukraine liberates entire Donbas, or at least cuts the land bridge to Crimea, it doesn't have to lose Crimea even if it doesn't manage to liberate it now. Because without this land bridge, Crimea is not an integral part of Russia, geographically or economically. It's more of a close overseas colony, Like Northern Ireland for Britain.
United Kingdom is not activelly "briticizing" Northern Irish nor deporting them thousands of km away replacing them with Englishmen.
If ceasefire, koreization or peace will be achieved, Ukraine will not break it and will not get anything it does not control atm when hostilities stopped.
russians will have time to replace the population and in 50 years Ukraine getting Crimea will be as dead as PL getting Lviv or Germany getting Wrocław.
If Ukraine doesn't get Crimea back now and it stays in Russia for 50 more years then I will also think it's best not to revisit the issue (if I'm still alive at that time that is).
But if Ukraine without Crimea joins the EU and Russia remains subject to sanctions, the idea of switching allegiance from Russia to Ukraine may be quite tempting for the residents of Crimea, even if they will be mostly Russian settlers. The question is if Ukraine would want to welcome such Troian horse.
I wonder if you could say something about Nagorno-Karabakh. This is not about Ukraine, but it would fit into the broader theme of eastsplaning the post-Soviet space and the comparison with the situation in Ukraine might be interesting. Was Nagorno-Karabakh a case fake separatism, invented by Armenia and Russia to extend their imperialism to parts of Azerbaijan? Were the Russian troops peacekeepers or occupiers? Is it a good solution that Nagorno-Karabakh ceases to exist and the internationally recognised borders are respected?
This blog is only about Russian aggression on Ukraine. It is not about the West Bank, Iraq or Vietnam War. It's not about Israel, Taiwan or Latin America. I might have an opinion - or not. But I would rather avoid whataboutism just to stay on topic.
I don't need to look futher than the previous note to see how much you have to say about the war in Chechnya, the war in Afghanistan, even the Russo-Japanese war. So why don't you want to say anything about the war in Nagorno-Karabakh in the context of Ukraine? There are so many obvious similarities: there was a former internal USSR border that a lot of people disagreed with, which became an official interstate border, there was an unrecognised republic that was de-facto quasi-independent, quasi-integrated with its big brother, and in the end its "independence" relied mostly on the Russian army. And we've just seen a counter-offensive that aimed at restoring internationally recognised borders.
If you really want to nitpick such details, from the point of view of the current government of Crimea, the Republic of Crimea was in fact independent between 11 March 2014, when it declared independence, and 18 March 2014, when it joined Russia. And there were, of course, DPR and LPR, whose de-facto quasi-independence didn't end completely even after joining Russia – according to Eastsplaining, there are still border checks and quite a few things work differently there than in other parts of Russia. So what is your point actually?
"the Republic of Crimea was in fact independent between 11 March 2014, when it declared independence, and 18 March 2014, when it joined Russia"
Seven days! And it wasn't really any actual independence, just a delay in Russian legal proceedings.
"And there were, of course, DPR and LPR, whose de-facto quasi-independence didn't end completely even after joining Russia – according to Eastsplaining, there are still border checks and quite a few things work differently there than in other parts of Russia."
Border checks and "few things working differently" aren't evidence of independence. They're evidence of Russia treating this parts of Ukraine as its colony. Russia extracted resources and manpower from DPR and LPR. A significant chunk of the male population of those two regions died fighting for Russia.
Don't accuse me of "nitpicking the details" when your arguments routinely fall apart when you look at them a bit closer. Your shoddy thinking is not my fault.
That's not independence and that's why I used the prefix quasi-, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult to understand. Now that you have described the situation on the Ukrainian territory, please tell me where you see the difference from the situation on the Azerbaijani territory, which you supposedly pointed out in your nitpick.
If you read my blog, you should now that by 11 March they were already controlled by Russia, so they were not "de facto quasi independent". Since the assault on local parliament and installment of the Quisling government in late February, they were in de facto occupation (much like Norway in WW2).
Yes, it was quasi-independent, just as quasi-independent as Nagorno-Karabakh was from Armenia. Which means: not really. Robert Kocharyan, for example, moved easily between top positions in Nagorno-Karabakh and in Armenia, Armenian army stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh and it's hard to imagine this quasi-state doing anything Armenia wouldn't like.
The southern shore of Crimea was ruled directly by the Ottomans (not the vassalized Khanate), and most of the diversity was there (with similar policies, so that doesn't change the conclusions, I'm just nitpicking).
Always appreciated!
The argument from Crimea I hear in the version, "but the Russian minority in Ukraine is not treated properly and wants to Russia." Apparently this is what Ukrainian refugees claim, and Le Monde. I have tried to explain that the bad attitude towards Russians is a result of Russian politics and the war, that no democratic votes confirm support for Russia, and we only have reports that are heavily politically charged, and well, that the situation can be compared to the German minority in Poland, after Hitler unleashed the war. And that as long as the war continues, sympathizing with the minority from the aggressor nation and ignoring the rights of the invaded majority, is immoral. Well, but "they" do not understand what is being said to them....
The point I'm trying to make is that these people are not even a "minority". They are mostly Russian citizens who either came there after 2014, or never applied for Ukrainian citizenship in the first place, taking advantage of the special status of Sevastopol. I don't think they should have a say about the future of Crimea. It would be like allowing German occupiers to remain in France or Norway and happily vote for Petain or Quisling.
I agree with you, but I think the Crimea problem looks "simple" only if you think only until the eventual liberation. What comes after may well look pretty ugly, because Russia will pull every trick in the book to make the pro-Russia residents of Crimea (both those who lived there before 2014 and those who settled after the annexation) look as victims. They might even try to organise a guerilla movement there. When will Ukraine do then? Run its own West Bank show? Won't look too good on the EU membership application form...
Well, I think those who came after 2014 are literally illegal aliens, so their removal should be pretty straitghtforward. I don't believe in "Russian guerilla". We never saw anything like this, even in the rusophone cities like Odesa or Krivyi Rih. People declaring they are "pro Russian" are mostly "pro authority", when authority changes, they will change.
I expect Russia to make this as nasty as possible, e.g destroy the local archives before moving, so that Ukrainian citizens who lost their documents have it difficult to prove they're not illegal aliens. Or Russian settlers will start claiming they've actually lived in Crimea since 2010, for example. It's going to be fun.
I don't think it will be a major issue (especially compared to actual liberation). Ukraine did a great job digitizing its archives. If you ever had Ukrainian citizenship, it should be easy to prove. Even after years of occupation.
And if someone never did... well, they can only ask Ukrainian authorities for generous treatment, but actually they can be removed as undesired aliens.
I agree that it's a just solution, but we both know how Western NGOs like Amnesty International or HRW are going to jump at that.
One thing which I don't understand is why Turkey with all those Erdogan's words about uniting turkish nations is not involving itself more in Crimea and Tatars protection. BTW: I'm not sure if it's true but I've heard from one Turkish guy that there are more Tatars living in Turkey than in Crimea and Russia together. They would be natural candidates for peacekeepers after the war.
Turkey is a member of NATO. I certainly hope that Russia loses the war badly enough that they have to accept NATO peacekeepers in Crimea, but I wouldn't count on it.
We should not encourage Turkey to attempt to restore the Ottoman Empire, it will end in a similar tragedy as Putin's attempt to restore the Russian one.
"Turkey with all those Erdogan's words about uniting turkish nations"
Here is your problem: 1. Erdogan's. 2. Words.
Politicians, especially of this kind, will say anything when they need to justify their actions. The real question here is: how's the risk/reward looking?
"Current Russian propaganda is portraying this transfer as something sinister, erroneous, controversial, or even illegal (as if the decision of the party leaders could ever be illegal in a communist country!). This is a new phenomenon caused by looking for justification of the war - there was no controversy about it as far back as 10 years ago."
There was. According to Plokhy, already in the 90s the Russian parliament declared the transfer of Crimea illegal and claimed Sevastopol for the Russian Federation. Yeltsin also said that "Crimea is Russian" after hearing that it voted, like the rest of Ukraine, for indepence from the USSR. His vice president, Rutskoi, declared in 1992 that the transfer should be reversed. And so on.
They wanted it back for a long time.
I must say 30 years ago I would kind of agree with their claim to Sevastopol. "They built this city" (not of rock and roll, but of naval base). But this problem was solved by a treaty leasing the base to the Russian for decades and a special status of the whole city. By using the base in agression against Ukraine, Russians violated the treaty and I don't believe there will be "Russian Sevastopol" when the war ends.
https://kyivindependent.com/uk-defense-ministry-strikes-on-black-sea-fleet-hindering-russias-ability-to-defend-its-port-assets/
Sevastopol is not valuable as a naval base for Russia now unless it somehow makes peace with Ukraine. You can't keep a naval base so close to a hostile country.
This improves Ukraine's negotiating position in any eventual talks, I think.
"If you feel that Crimean toponomics often sound like they are derived from Greek or Latin (Theodosia, Eupatoria, Taurida) it’s because they are."
One of the reasons why Russia is so obsessed with Crimea appears to be that it provides them with a "connection to the ancient greco-roman civilisation", thus lending some credibility to the "Third Rome" narrative. Obviously another example of megalomania and/or magical thinking, but still worth mentioning.
Ownership of the land is successful ethnic cleansing plus time.
Contrary to what many Ukrainians learn in school Poland didn't annex Western Ukraine in 1920, this is ahistoric as at the time both nations had reasonable claims (even if Poland get much more than it should) - but after most Poles were disappeared from there, no one sane in Poland treats these territories as polish in any sense except historical.
The same goes for Eastern Prussia or Western Pomerania.
Kosovo is historical heartland of Serbia but is today widely accepted as separate from Serbia because Albanians (just for simplicity, I know it's more complicated) settled and lived there long enough time ago that there is no point of reverting it.
Lets not even start considering Native Americans here.
Israel uses settlers in the hope of doing the same. After enough generations of settlers no deal to give some territory back to Palestine will be seen as sane.
There is not enough Crimean Tatars left and they are too dispersed arounf the world to make Crimea a Tatar state.
If putin didn't invade in 2022 he would probably have kept Crimea long enough, to make it impossible to take away - whether it would be 30 years or 75.
That's why I really hope, Ukraine will get back Crimea this time. Because with every decade it will be harder to justify.
The counter-argument could be Northern Ireland, though. The unification of NI with the Republic of Ireland is possible at any moment, arguably.
That's why I think that if Ukraine liberates entire Donbas, or at least cuts the land bridge to Crimea, it doesn't have to lose Crimea even if it doesn't manage to liberate it now. Because without this land bridge, Crimea is not an integral part of Russia, geographically or economically. It's more of a close overseas colony, Like Northern Ireland for Britain.
United Kingdom is not activelly "briticizing" Northern Irish nor deporting them thousands of km away replacing them with Englishmen.
If ceasefire, koreization or peace will be achieved, Ukraine will not break it and will not get anything it does not control atm when hostilities stopped.
russians will have time to replace the population and in 50 years Ukraine getting Crimea will be as dead as PL getting Lviv or Germany getting Wrocław.
Actively maybe not - but they did that through all XIX century until 1960s at least
If Ukraine doesn't get Crimea back now and it stays in Russia for 50 more years then I will also think it's best not to revisit the issue (if I'm still alive at that time that is).
But if Ukraine without Crimea joins the EU and Russia remains subject to sanctions, the idea of switching allegiance from Russia to Ukraine may be quite tempting for the residents of Crimea, even if they will be mostly Russian settlers. The question is if Ukraine would want to welcome such Troian horse.
I wonder if you could say something about Nagorno-Karabakh. This is not about Ukraine, but it would fit into the broader theme of eastsplaning the post-Soviet space and the comparison with the situation in Ukraine might be interesting. Was Nagorno-Karabakh a case fake separatism, invented by Armenia and Russia to extend their imperialism to parts of Azerbaijan? Were the Russian troops peacekeepers or occupiers? Is it a good solution that Nagorno-Karabakh ceases to exist and the internationally recognised borders are respected?
This blog is only about Russian aggression on Ukraine. It is not about the West Bank, Iraq or Vietnam War. It's not about Israel, Taiwan or Latin America. I might have an opinion - or not. But I would rather avoid whataboutism just to stay on topic.
I don't need to look futher than the previous note to see how much you have to say about the war in Chechnya, the war in Afghanistan, even the Russo-Japanese war. So why don't you want to say anything about the war in Nagorno-Karabakh in the context of Ukraine? There are so many obvious similarities: there was a former internal USSR border that a lot of people disagreed with, which became an official interstate border, there was an unrecognised republic that was de-facto quasi-independent, quasi-integrated with its big brother, and in the end its "independence" relied mostly on the Russian army. And we've just seen a counter-offensive that aimed at restoring internationally recognised borders.
"there was an unrecognised republic that was de-facto quasi-independent"
Only in Artsakh. Not in Crimea.
If you really want to nitpick such details, from the point of view of the current government of Crimea, the Republic of Crimea was in fact independent between 11 March 2014, when it declared independence, and 18 March 2014, when it joined Russia. And there were, of course, DPR and LPR, whose de-facto quasi-independence didn't end completely even after joining Russia – according to Eastsplaining, there are still border checks and quite a few things work differently there than in other parts of Russia. So what is your point actually?
"the Republic of Crimea was in fact independent between 11 March 2014, when it declared independence, and 18 March 2014, when it joined Russia"
Seven days! And it wasn't really any actual independence, just a delay in Russian legal proceedings.
"And there were, of course, DPR and LPR, whose de-facto quasi-independence didn't end completely even after joining Russia – according to Eastsplaining, there are still border checks and quite a few things work differently there than in other parts of Russia."
Border checks and "few things working differently" aren't evidence of independence. They're evidence of Russia treating this parts of Ukraine as its colony. Russia extracted resources and manpower from DPR and LPR. A significant chunk of the male population of those two regions died fighting for Russia.
That's not independence, that's being a colony.
Don't accuse me of "nitpicking the details" when your arguments routinely fall apart when you look at them a bit closer. Your shoddy thinking is not my fault.
That's not independence and that's why I used the prefix quasi-, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult to understand. Now that you have described the situation on the Ukrainian territory, please tell me where you see the difference from the situation on the Azerbaijani territory, which you supposedly pointed out in your nitpick.
If you read my blog, you should now that by 11 March they were already controlled by Russia, so they were not "de facto quasi independent". Since the assault on local parliament and installment of the Quisling government in late February, they were in de facto occupation (much like Norway in WW2).
How Russia eviscerated Donbas: https://jacobin.com/2022/03/donbas-donetsk-luhansk-ukraine-russia-putin
quasi: "apparently but not really; seemingly"
Yes, it was quasi-independent, just as quasi-independent as Nagorno-Karabakh was from Armenia. Which means: not really. Robert Kocharyan, for example, moved easily between top positions in Nagorno-Karabakh and in Armenia, Armenian army stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh and it's hard to imagine this quasi-state doing anything Armenia wouldn't like.
Just wondering if the recent article by Zaluzhny, which said that the war has reached a "stalemate", hasn't dampened anyone's enthusiasm.