by Michael Karadjis

This is the third in an ongoing series of well-known assertions that have been spread about the situation in Ukraine since 2014, all of which are complete myths. Of course, this is not the only place these myths are demolished, but they are so widespread that the more they are shot down, the better; and I just felt I needed my own so that I can easily grab one as an easy whenever I see each piece of nonsense once again repeated on social media.

_{Indigenous Crimean Tatars – victims of centuries of Russian colonialism and genocide – protest annexation by Russia in 2014}

Russia’s flagrant annexation of the sovereign Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014 was the first annexation inside Europe since the (globally unrecognised) Turkish quasi-annexation of northern Cyprus, and in a league with only very few outright annexations globally – Israel’s annexation of Palestinian Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan, Morocco’s annexation of the Western Sahara, Indonesia’s annexation of Irian Jaya and later east Timor (until 1999) spring to mind. Yet Putin apologists have attempted to justify this act of Russian imperial expansionism as an act of self-determination by the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea (which frankly reminds one of Hitler’s claim to Sudetenland), or claim it was ‘always Russia’ and so on. 

On February 27, 2014, just five days after the Ukraine parliament’s vote to oust Yanukovych, masked Russian troops invaded Crimea – sovereign Ukrainian territory – attacked government buildings, raised the Russian flag over them, forced out the democratically-elected Crimea autonomous state government, replaced it with stooges from the ultra-right ‘Russian Unity’ party, which had received 4 percent of the vote in the previous elections – surely all this is a coup, isn’t it? It is a textbook coup, combined with invasion. This foreign-installed junta in Crimea then carried out, under Russian military occupation, the illegal “referendum” to leave Ukraine and join Russia, within ten days after calling it. Only two options were presented in the fake “referendum,” neither of which included the status quo. Ukrainian media was closed down.

Of course, the junta declared that 97 percent had voted for joining Russia – the usual figure plucked out of the air by dictators who throw “election” circuses. Yet Putin’s own Human Rights Council claimed the real turnout was 30-50% of voters, and that only 50-60% of those voted to join Russia. Notably, in a February 8-18 2014 Ukraine-wide poll, only 41 percent of people in Crimea favoured joining Russia – and that was far higher than anywhere else in Ukraine; we are supposed to believe that this jumped from 41% to 97% in a month!

International observers – of course, the Russian-installed junta invited various far-right/fascist parties from Europe for this show, indeed the invitees list – the French National Front, Jobbik (Hungary), Attaka (Bulgaria), Austrian Freedom Party, Belgian Vlaams Belang, Italy’s Forza Italia and Lega Nord, and Poland’s Self-Defense – reads virtually like a roll-call of the European far-right. Fascist parties throughout Europe declared their support for Crimea being “reincorporated” into Russia, its rightful place in their view, believers in the restoration of empires after all.

In contrast, the Mejils (parliament) of the Crimean Tatar nation, internationally recognised as the Indigenous people of Crimea (and likewise recognised as such in Ukraine), and a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation, declared the referendum illegitimate and called for boycott, just in case anyone on the so-called ‘anti-imperialist’ left happens to think the views of Indigenous peoples should count for something. The Russian occupation regime of post-referendum Crimea then banned the Mejils, their representative body first set up by the Crimean Tatars after the Russian revolution, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has documented ongoing human rights violations, including detention and torture, against the Tatar population. Today, the Mejils, in exile, demands the return of Crimea to Ukraine as an essential condition in any peace talks with Russia.

_{From 100% of the population at Russian conquest in 1783, the Crimean Tatars became a minority 100 years later, but then were 100% deported by Stalin in 1944}

The Crimean Tatars were the majority population of Crimea since the 11^th century, and remained so long after Russian settler-colonialism began with Catherine the Great’s invasion in 1783. Not until around 1900 did these Russian settlers begin to outnumber the indigenous Tatar population, who also fled Russian oppression in their hundreds of thousands. However they remained some 40 percent of the population until 1944 when Stalin expelled every man, woman and child Tatar from Crimea – hundreds of thousands of people – into central Asia, a torturous journey during which one in three died along the way. While they have been allowed to return in recent decades, such mass displacement tends to have a semi-permanent effect, and numbers were only re-growing slowly,  but continually, before this process was halted by annexation. In other words, the “left” (and far-right) assertion that, since 58 percent of the population of Crimea are ethnic Russians, annexation by Russia is an act of self-determination, is a declaration of support for the results of centuries of Tsarist colonialism and the Stalinist genocide.

An interesting comparison could be made to the current debate in Australia about an Indigenous ‘Voice’ to parliament, which will be subject to referendum later this year. While the tepid and powerless ‘voice’ on offer can well be criticised for its limitations, and indeed many Indigenous leaders prefer a ‘treaty-first’ approach which would recognise their sovereignty and cede some actual power to the Indigenous nations, the main opposition is coming from the right who are vigorously opposed to any even symbolic increase in Indigenous representation. From being once the sovereign owners of the whole of Australia, Indigenous Australians have been reduced, through colonisation and genocide, to only a few percent of the population.

So, using the same simple ‘majoritarian’ principles that many Putin apologists are now using to justify the result of the staged Crimea ‘referendum’ (even if we pretend for a moment that it was legitimate and not staged under military occupation) – that 58 percent of the Crimean population are ethnic Russians and so, if that’s what they want, so it should be – what would we say if the large Anglo-Australian majority here one fine day voted to be re-annexed to ‘Great’ Britain, and the 3 percent Indigenous Australian population were opposed? Should we say, well, the (former colons) Anglo-Australians are the majority, so it should be, like the (former colons) Russians in Crimea? Or would we say that Indigenous Australians should have some special constitutional right to not have their lands returned to some foreign colonial power? I suggest that the kind of constitutionally empowered real Indigenous voice via treaty that most on the Australian left are in favour of would indeed empower the Indigenous minority to reject such a move, and rightly so.

And, more generally, when there exists more than one constituent nation in a mixed region – in this case Russians, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars – is ‘winner take all’ the democratic solution? Take Cyprus (a place I know something about …), with its 80 percent Greek Cypriot majority and 20 percent Turkish Cypriot minority. So if the majority of the majority Greek Cypriot community vote to be united with Greece, so that should be, right? Oh, wait a minute, they tried that, with the movement against British colonialism led by the right-wing and the Orthodox church, calling for ‘Enosis’ (union) with Greece (rather than an independent bi-national federation) … thereby alienating the Turkish minority, driving them into the hands of Turkey’s military regime which eventually invaded in 1974 and the rest is history. No solution in the divided island 50 years later. Or take Bosnia, with its 44 percent Bosniak (‘Muslim’), 30 percent Serb, 18 percent Croat and 8 percent ‘Yugoslav’ (ie too mixed to be anything else) population – no majority, but if the Serbs and Croats voted together for Bosnia to be divided between Serbia and Croatia and got a slight majority of votes, so that should happen despite the views of the other communities? Indeed, since Serb and Croat fascist leaders actually tried to do that militarily in 1992-95, they were in the right, were they? The Crimea ‘solution’, in other words, is the most utterly reactionary solution possible.   

On a minor point, one of the justifications often heard from Putin shills is that Russia had to seize Crimea because it has a naval base in Sevastopol (and heaven forbid that an imperialist power should lose a military base in another country, say many on the western ‘left’). Yet the Russian military’s lease on Sevastopol does not expire until 2042.