Posted on 02/24/2014 10:20:59 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
As the battle on Maidan ends with the defeat and humiliation of President Viktor Yanukovych, some observers have turned their attention to Ukraine's Crimea region with the following question: If Ukraine turns toward the European Union and the West, will President Vladimir Putin move to seize Crimea?
While Crimea is situated far from the drama of Kiev, it stands out as the only region in Ukraine where Russians are in the majority, constituting about 60 percent of Crimea's population. There is also a critical naval base at Sevastopol that the Russians lease from Ukraine. Sevastopol serves as the home of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, and it gives the Russian Navy direct access to the Mediterranean Sea. Russia has signed a lease agreement with Ukraine that allows its fleet to remain at Sevastopol until 2042.
For two centuries, Crimea was part of Russia, and to many Russians it is only through a strange quirk of Soviet history that Crimea is not part of Russia today. On Feb. 19, 1954, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, gifted Crimea to Ukraine as a gesture of goodwill to mark the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's merger with tsarist Russia. Not surprisingly, at the time, it did not occur to anyone that one day the Soviet Union might collapse and that Ukraine would again be an independent country.
Last week, one of Putin's leading advisers, Vladislav Surkov, visited Crimea and met Crimean leader Anatoly Mogilev, Crimean legislative Speaker Vladimir Konstantinov, and Sevastopol Governor Vladimir Yatsuboi. The talks were followed up by a meeting in Moscow on Feb. 20 between Konstantinov and Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of the State Duma.
Underscoring Russia's interest in Crimea, an unidentified Russian government official told the Financial Times on Feb. 20 that Russia was willing to fight a war over Crimea if Ukraine started to disintegrate. "If Ukraine breaks apart, it will trigger a war," the official said. "They will lose Crimea first [because] we will go in and protect [it], just as we did in Georgia."
This viewpoint seems to reflect Kremlin thinking. At a 2008 meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush, Putin reportedly told Bush that Ukraine was an accident of history.
There is ample precedent, furthermore, to believe that if Putin and the Russian establishment believed that Ukraine was slipping permanently out of their grasp, then Russia would find a pretext to seize Crimea. Russia has made it amply clear that it considers the former Soviet Union to be a space where it sees itself having wide latitude for maneuver.
Russia has not hesitated to act militarily within the former Soviet Union, first in the self-proclaimed Transdnestr republic in 1992 and then in South Ossetia in 2008 during its brief war with Georgia. After the end of the war in Georgia, Russia became the only country in the world to officially recognize the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. While Russia does not officially recognize Transdnestr, it has a consulate there, many of Transdnestr's citizens have Russian passports and the Russians provide a de-facto guarantee of Transdnestr remaining separate from Moldova.
If Ukraine turns decisively West, it may well find that it is forced to leave Crimea behind.
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Josh Cohen is a former U.S. State Department official who was involved in managing economic reform projects in the former Soviet Union. He currently works for a satellite technology company in the Washington area.
I tend to take a different tack on such things.
Russians, as individuals, I take as individuals. I’ve liked some I’ve met and disliked others.
But I see Russia as a threat. And I see Russia as a threat that wishes to grow to an even greater threat. I see a Russia with an ego that demands it be taken seriously as a threat, so is fully prepared to behave in a manner destructive to us.
Therefore, I stand full and four square against anything that would increase Russia in scope or power.
Secession? What’s THAT?
Oh yeah, a right acceptable in every place on earth, except in the USA.
/s
Well....there’s one interesting issue. It’s the eastern side of the country that would be mostly Russian in interest. ALL of the Russian natural gas lines....run through the western sector. So, there’s some serious thinking going on here. It’s best to go in....get corrupt with the new guys, and pretend things are ok with a friendly EU and a new gov’t...while building up the old corruption cycle. There’s too much at stake here to screw things up.
The Tartars have been getting pretty noisy in Crimea too
I was talking about them.
“It will then turn into a full blown civil war much in the form of the Spanish civil war.”
Could be. The unknown is which way will the Ukraine military go? And, will it align one way or the other in total or will it split along ethnic lines? Stay tuned this is gonna get nasty....
However, the Treaty of Pereyaslav was not what the Russians are trying to promote:
On January 18, 1654, Khmelnytsky signed a unilateral oath of loyalty to the tsar of Muscovy (now Russia). Khmelnytsky expected the oath to be bilateral, with the Ukrainians swearing loyalty to the tsar and the latter promising to protect them from the Poles and to respect their rights and priviledges. But Buturlin [Muscovite delegate] refused to swear in the name of his monarch, arguing that the tsar, unlike the Polish king, was an absolute ruler and that it was below his dignity to take an oath to his subjects. ...Fearful of losing the tsar’s aid, [Khmelnytsky] agreed [to the terms].
Because of the conflicts that later developed between Russians and Ukrainians, the interpretation of the [Pereyaslav] treaty that brought their two countries together has been the subject of frequent debate among scholars. The issue is complicated by the fact that the original documents were lost and only inaccurate copies and translations have survived. Moreover, the Russian archivist Petr Shafranov has argued that even these copies were falsified by the tsar’s scribes.
http://www.brama.com/ukraine/history/pereyaslav/
Now, when we are into numerology, why not go back a further 600 years:
The main religious issue by the early 1000s was the makeup of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Nicene Creed, which had been around since the 400s, stated that the Holy Spirit “proceeded” or came out of the Father. Yet the idea developed within the European Christian community that this needed to be changed. Using such verses as John 16:13-15, Galatians 4:6, and Romans 8:9, those in Rome decided to add the phrase “and from the Son” when describing from where the Holy Spirit came. This is known as the “Double Procession,” that the Holy Spirit comes out of the Father and the Son.
The Christians centered in Constantinople disagreed with this and did not want it added to the Creed. Those in Rome did not reject the new phrase. By 1054 both the Roman church and the Constantinople church had “declined communion to the other,” in effect excommunicating the other. This was due do the regional differences mentioned at the top, but mainly to understandings of how God works and who gets to decide.
So began a new era of Christianity. For 1000 years the Church had been one, now it was two.
http://www.christiantimelines.com/1054.htm
But, as dfwgator wrote the real reason was a bargaining chip in the power struggle in Kreml.
bttt
The gas lines are Russia’s ace in the hole. They essentially have a silver bullet to any situation with those. Putin has his hands on the valve and unlike the Saudis, is more than willing to turn it on a whim. We could wield similar influence in our own region, but unfortunately thanks to the libs, our resources remain unused like dry buckwheat.
If he’s read Clancy’s last novel, he might just do that.
“They will lose Crimea first [because] we will go in and protect [it], just as we did in Georgia.”
I knew it!
Not until after the West pours millions into the country to help its economy.
Why rob a bank that doesn’t have any money???
If Ukraine doesn’t just hand it over, there will be a separatist movement, like Ossetia, created by Russia to goad Ukraine into conflict. Then Russia can ride in as protectors as they did in Georgia. The question, will Ukraine spring the trap like Georgia did?
And so should Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Exactly. It’s the same with China. It doesn’t matter if they are nice people or not, like homo/don’t like homo etc. Some people don’t get it.
Also, the true natives like the Tartars and Greeks were kicked out in WWII by Stalin in a mass deportation, completely changing the demographics
The greeks in particular had lived in Taurica for nearly 3000 years until Stalin came along
To whom... socialist Europe? The Muslim Califate? Al-Qaeda? Pedophiles?
I fear the Banderaites will take control in Ukraine.
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