Crimea wants to secede from the Ukraine – the situation is more complicated now
The fact that the citizens of Crimea themselves want to break away from Ukraine certainly complicates things.
There is a potential for Civil War.
These questions of whether areas should be able to break away from a country and join another country or create a new country are always particularly sticky. On the one hand, you think the democratic process should decide. After all that’s what happened in Ukrainians recently. The U.S. is a particularly difficult position regarding this, because you know what the union’s stance was about this during the U.S. own civil war.
Obviously what Russia did was illegal. But if the people of Crimea themselves do not object, isn’t it hard to get worked up and feel the US should be involved?
This article is a good one, and worth the read. It talks about the legality of what is happening.
I think what is “legal” in the cases of revolutions is pretty much ad hoc and just depends on your own political interests.
The Crimeans with the most to lose in this deal are the Tatar population, and it’s not hard to imagine them becoming aligned with the Chechens and other disaffected Muslim groups of the FSU. However, AFAIK the Tatars don’t control significant military assets and I think it would be a “war” only if something approaching an organized army existed on both sides. Semantics aside, I agree that with the way this is heading long term violence is very likely.
Why did Khrushchev originally separate Crimea back in the 1950s?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/07/world/europe/crimea-russia.html?hp&_r=0
My recollection is that Khrushchev was an ethnic Russian who grew up in the Ukraine (but maybe it was one of the other republics). It’s possible his origins had something to do with that change.
One of my instructors in Russian believed that Stalin (a Georgian) and Khrushchev (not a “real” Russian according to my instructor) treated Russians badly because they didn’t see themselves as Russians. I don’t know whether Georgia and Ukraine actually got better treatment than Russia during the worst of the Soviet years but it’s an interesting theory.