Recently, the Russian Federation (RF) increased its military presence in Ukrainian Crimea and started blocking Ukrainian military bases as well as sabotaging their daily operations by cutting off electricity, food and water supply, and other essentials. President Putin attempts to justify these actions as Russia’s response to instability and ethnic conflict, to right-wing extremists coming to power, to a threat to the Russian-speaking population and human rights violations, and to Russia’s legitimate historical rights to Crimea. None of these points are true, no matter how plausible they may initially sound. Here is why:
Before Russian troops invaded Crimea, it was a safe and peaceful region and a tourist destination that hosted about six million vacationers annually. It was not until after the arrival of the Russian military and pro-Russian “volunteers” that the areas near Ukrainian military bases became engulfed in acts of violence, attacks on journalists, threats to Crimean Tatars, and blocking of the roads. The Russian occupation of Crimea has already wreaked havoc and brought instability and the very real possibility of widespread ethnic conflict in the region.
To justify the invasion President Putin claims that the “right-wing extremists” came to power in Kyiv and yet there is no such member of the current Ukrainian government. The most radical wing – Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector – Ed.,) – is not represented in Ukraine’s parliament. Moreover, since being formed in November 2013, neither the Right Sector nor its initiating organizations have ever been implicated in crimes related to ethnic, religious, or racial discrimination. Numerous international watchdog organizations suggest that despite the growing popularity of the right-wing parties in Ukraine, the country is not under threat of racial or ethnic intolerance. In fact, even in the interim government at the national and local levels there are representatives of various ethnicities: Ukraine’s acting president is an ethnic Russian and evangelical Christian; the acting minister of defense is part-Roma; the acting interior minister is an ethnic Armenian who grew up in the East. The new governor of Dnipropetrovsk, in Ukraine’s East, is Jewish. In Russia, on the other hand, has been known for beatings and killing of people from Asia and Africa and for setting hostels on fire. Last year, the Moscow area of Biryulyovo became the place of massive pogroms against the Central Asians.
The conscious distortion of reality – protection of the allegedly suppressed Russian-speaking residents – has been another one of Putin’s explanations for the invasion of Russian troops. The rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine are exactly the same as, for example, the rights of Hispanic U.S. citizens in the United States – knowledge of Ukrainian is required to work in the public service or to get higher education, but in all other spheres of life the Russian language is used on a par with Ukrainian. Interestingly, many leaders of Maidan and of today’s interim government are Russian-speakers.
The claim of massive violations of human rights in Ukraine does not withstand any criticism. Russia’s Foreign Ministry has never issued a recommendation to its citizens not to travel to Ukraine. Moreover, no Russian company operating in Ukraine evacuated or withdrew their employees during the armed conflicts on Maidan. Had the Russian authorities believed there was a threat to their citizens or to the Russian speakers, the situation would obviously be different.
Lastly, Russia has been speculating about having legitimate rights to Ukrainian territory omitting the fact that Crimea became associated with Russia 62 years later than Estonia and Latvia, where about half of the inhabitants are Russian-speaking or Russian by nationality. The current ethnic composition of the Crimean population, in contrast to the situation in Kosovo, is not the result of natural demographic processes, but rather the result of the deportation of Crimea’s local inhabitants – Crimean Tatars, Greeks and Armenians – by Joseph Stalin in 1944, and of the forceful relocation of people from inland areas of Russia to replace them.
Having explored the above reasons provided by the Kremlin to justify the initiation of the military invasion into Ukrainian Crimea one might wonder what the true reasons are.
