UKRAINIAN UTOPIA

At the UN General Assembly, President Poroshenko discussed the establishment of an international circle of friends of de-occupation of the Crimea for the coordination of joint steps and actions. The aim of this proposal calls for Russia’s peaceful withdrawal from Crimea. To this end Ukraine proposes  to use all available instruments of international law, international courts and arbitrages, monitoring mechanisms, international organizations and fora. The EU non-recognition policy gives Ukraine confidence in the overwhelming support by its international partners.

According to Ukraine the occupation of Crimea is not only about the violation of international law but that the peninsula has become a grey zone for human rights and a territory of fear. Ukraine claims that the repression of Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians who do not recognize the ‘illegal annexation’ of Crimea continues.

Ukraine points out that obviously Russia is not going to leave Crimea on its own. Therefore “We have to make it do so. We should step up international diplomatic and political pressure on the aggressor to restore Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea and to release dozens of Ukrainian political prisoners prosecuted by Russia. Expanding sanctions towards the participants of faked elections in the occupied territory of Crimea and Sevastopol as well as to those responsible for grave human rights violations should be in our toolkit. It could probably be a long way, but only by bringing Russia back to the norms and principles of international law and by not giving up our common values we could safeguard peace, security and stability in the region.”

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in an interview with Stern magazine said that no President of Russia will ever give up Crimea and will not deliver the Peninsula from the Russian Federation. From now on Crimea is Russian territory!!

Note

It should be noted that Russian Crimea has improved the legal rights and interests of the Tatars community which, under Ukraine, were ignored or grossly violated. The law on the rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatars was immediately passed. Tatars are living better now than they ever have. Ukraine neglected them woefully even when Ukraine had the resources to do better. The Tatar standard of living has markedly improved. They have new schools. Those on pensions have doubled their income, those in state service, police and army also. They are provided free medicines. Their language has become an official language, their political representation in the Crimean parliament is guaranteed. The situation in the Crimea has changed for the better. The period of adaptation was completed rather quickly. Now in Crimea there is order in all spheres, many jobs, decent salaries, pensions and bonuses.

Today, 65% of Crimean Tatars have a positive view of the situation in Crimea and around 70% have successfully integrated themselves into Russian life. Regarding the alleged persecutions and the disbanding of the Mejlis, it should be pointed out that as part of Ukraine’s project to bind a restive Crimea to itself, the Mejlis was selectively filtered to be universally loyal to Ukraine to the point where its political inclinations came to fundamentally diverge from those of its supposed constituents. It is in this context that Russia’s banning of the Mejlis has to be viewed – an organization that owes its loyalty to a foreign power and which despite having zero democratic legitimacy,  not only pretends to  speak for every Crimean Tatar but engages in quasi-terrorist actions against Russia and ultimately its own people.

Set against that, the Crimean Tatar language has been made one of three official languages in the Republic of Crimea – a status that it never enjoyed in unitary Ukraine. This was part of a package of reforms that guaranteed and expanded their political and civil rights as an ethnic minority. They have also been able to share in the steep improvement in living standards that all Crimeans have enjoyed since joining Russia. Western headlines such as “The Misery and Terror of Life Under Putin in Crimea” regardless, economic statistics indicate that wages have stayed well ahead ahead of inflation; not only did Crimeans escape the vast contraction in living standards that occured in Poroshenko’s Ukraine, but the introduction of Russian-grade wages and pension payments even allowed them to bypass the (much more minor) recession taking place in Russia itself. All things considered, Crimean Tatars have not sharply turned against Russia , however much the neocons, the Poroshenko regime, and their pet Mejlis might wish it were otherwise.