What you need to know about the crisis in Crimea

 

The Russian occupation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea has remained atop global news story. What began as Ukrainian domestic instability has escalated into an international crisis with global ramifications.

This situation’s roots date back to the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse. There has been an allegiance struggle since Ukraine gained independence; some wish to align with Russia, while others desire stronger ties with the West. Russian sympathizers generally reside in the southern and eastern parts of the country, while their opponents live in the north. This divide exists in the Crimean peninsula in southern Ukraine, where about 60 percent of the inhabitants are ethnic Russians and only 25 percent are ethnic Ukrainians.

The conflict between these groups first exploded in November 2013 when former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych announced that his administration would not forge closer ties with the European Union (EU) but would instead foster a closer relationship with Moscow. Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Kiev, the nation’s capital, where the police attempted to brutally crush the demonstrations. The harsh anti-protest laws Yanukovych approved in response led to the deaths of three protesters.

Though the Ukrainian government made concessions to the protesters in January, they did not address a constitutional reform to limit presidential powers, which amplified the protests. Riot police responded to the escalation with a harsh crackdown on Independence Square in Kiev on February 18, killing 26 people. A European-mediated plan was enacted by February 21 to call for new elections. By that point, 82 people had died and the main opposition leader had been released from jail. It seemed as if the months of paralyzing protests were ending for Ukraine.

Once the newly-elected Ukrainian parliament deposed Yanukovych, who had already fled to Russia, pro-Russian protesters began to act. On February 27, masked gunmen seized numerous government buildings in the Crimean peninsula, and, just days later, troops took over the entire province without firing a shot.

Despite the tens of thousands of protesters who gathered in Moscow after the invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin refused to concede and scheduled a referendum in Crimea for March 16. Unsurprisingly, 97 percent of Crimeans voted to cede their sovereignty to Russia in the referendum, which was not recognized as legitimate by the United States or its allies.

A February poll showed that just 41 percent of Crimeans, and 13 percent of Ukrainians as a whole, wanted unification with Russia, while 56 percent of Russians viewed Crimea as a Russian territory. By March 20, the Ukrainian military bowed to Russian reality and began to withdraw all 25,000 of its military personnel from Crimea. Putin proceeded to call Crimea an “inseparable part of Russia.”

Unlike the swift Russian takeover of Crimea, the international response to the incident has been, as Edward Morrissey of The Week puts it, “limp, little, and late.” Though the Russian stock market has declined by 20 percent since the onset of the crisis, the West has imposed minimal sanctions.

President Obama has authorized only the freezing of assets and travel opportunities of certain Russian officials, and the US has offered a $1 billion aid package to Ukraine, to supplement a $15 billion aid package being sent by the EU.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has called the invasion an “incredible act of aggression,” insisting that it was done “out of weakness and out of a certain kind of desperation.” No Western officials have mentioned the 1994 Budapest Memoriam, in which the US and the UK guaranteed Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for the relinquishment of Allied nuclear weapons. This standoff could easily have resulted in a war between the Cold War powers.

International bodies have also responded weakly. The UN Security Council resolved to dismiss the validity of the Crimean referendum on the grounds that Russian soldiers were located near the polling stations; Russia vetoed the resolution.

The UN did, however, pass a resolution declaring Russia’s annexation of Crimea illegal, with 100 countries voting yes and just 11 dissenting. Similarly, the US and the Group of 7 powers temporarily removed Russia from the Group of 8, an economic organization that planned to meet in Russia later this year.

Many politicos have compared Putin’s moves in Crimea to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. Notre Dame Professor of Russian History Alex Martin disagrees with this view and says that Putin is not looking for a huge war of aggression in the same way that Hitler was.

“The annexation of Crimea has already badly damaged Russia’s foreign relations,” Martin told the Rover, “and Russian nationalists are now clamoring for even more annexations.” As a Russian history scholar, Martin wonders how Putin’s moves serve Russia’s long-term national interest.

Notre Dame College Republicans president Mark Gianfalla believes that Obama has “turned a blind eye to the blatant misuse of power in the Crimean region by Russian President Putin” and that the West’s economic sanctions “have done nothing to influence Russia on the world stage.” He describes the Russian invasion as “geopolitical bullying” and advocates stricter sanctions. The College Democrats could not be reached for comment.

Another troubling issue that stems from this international predicament is the possibility of further Russian expansion. In fact, Chair of the Political Science Department Michael Desch told the Rover, “The big question is whether the Russians are seriously considering a similar move in Eastern Ukraine.”

Desch claims that they will not try to expand and that the end result will be a neutral and federal Ukraine.

Other observers, such as Martin, worry that Russia might expand into states with similar demographics, such as Estonia and Latvia. Along with Lithuania, these three former Soviet republics are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, meaning that any Russian invasion would contractually compel the United States and all NATO members to send military aid.

The fact remains that flights to Kiev from Crimea depart from the international terminal. The question stands as to why the largest diplomatic catastrophe the world has seen in decades only entertained the media for a few weeks before being relegated to the back pages with the rest of the international news.

As Professor John Deak of the History Department put it in an interview with the Rover, “I wish our news media would be smarter about the region and I think our ignorance reflects the lack of resources our universities—including Notre Dame—puts toward the study of Russia and Eastern Europe.”

Louis Anthony Bruno Bertolotti is Italian (believe it or not) and from the great state of New Jersey. He is a freshman in the College of Arts and Letters. He plans to major in political science and can be contacted at Lbertolo@nd.edu.