On March 6, the Atlantic Council in Washington hosted a presentation and discussion on “Human Rights Abuses in Russian-Occupied Crimea” that featured a report by Andrii Klymenko, chief editor of the Black Sea News and chairman of the supervisory board for Maidan Foreign Affairs. The discussants included Mark Lagon, president of Freedom House, and David Kramer, senior director for human rights and human freedom at the McCain Institute; the moderator was former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst. The transcript of the presentation and discussion were made available on March 12 on the Atlantic Council website, www.atlanticcouncil.org. This first portion of The Ukrainian Weekly’s will feature the report and commentary by the organizers. The next installment will feature the discussion among the audience and the presenters.
PARSIPPANY, N.J. – Ambassador John Herbst began the presentation “Human Rights Abuses in Russian Occupied Crimea” by introducing the Atlantic Council’s Ukraine and Europe Initiative that has been working for almost a year to help Ukraine choose its own future since President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea almost 12 months ago. “His ardent wish is to have the world forget about the peninsula, and now our determination is to make sure that the world does not do that,” added Ambassador Herbst.
A report commissioned by the Atlantic Council and Freedom House was presented by Andrii Klymenko. Mr. Klymenko, who spoke in Ukrainian and had his remarks translated through an interpreter, covered the main points in his report, and allowed for discussion.
Russia’s use of various technologies since its seizure of administrative buildings in Symferopol, the capital of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Mr. Putin and Russia have done everything to violate human rights, international law and even violate the legal system of Russia.
Mr. Klymenko explained five of these technologies: “The first, imposing Russian citizenship and renunciation of Ukrainian citizenship. Secondly, it’s actually expulsion from Crimea of disloyal people. The third, well, it’s absolutely cynical disregard of the rights of the native population of Crimea, the Crimean Tatars. Fourth, well, this is sort of know-how: the creation of an information ghetto. Fifth, we’re talking about property rights. And I want to mention that at the time of finishing the report, we were talking about the expropriation of state property of Ukraine on the territory of Crimea.”
Besides laying out these tactics, Mr. Klymenko challenged his audience to answer the questions: “Why is Putin doing this? What are the real aims of Putin in Crimea? Are those aims only for Crimea? And what can we do to resist?”
Mr. Klymenko continued: “There’s still a big illusion that everyone in Crimea always massively supported Russian and being with Russia. The leader of Crimean Tatars, Mustafa Dzhemilev, and separate media outlets abroad published the leaks from the FSB about the real quantity of people who took part in the referendum last year. So the fact really is 34 percent. So 34 percent, not 83 percent as was published. So you can understand that if there were no observers at all, if we had just a million of ballots which were published additionally, when we have actually military troops [from Russia] in Crimea, when we have paramilitary units of Cossacks which were at the polls, so we understand with all those facts it’s easy to put any result. But in reality, the number 34 percent, as we think this is actually the number of [the] so-called separatist potential of Crimea, as it was for last year.”
On March 18, President Putin announced the imposition of Russian citizenship. Mr. Klymenko, who is a resident of Crimea, was considered a citizen of Russia even though he retained his Ukrainian passport. “Forty thousand people had left Crimea to other regions of Ukraine. …And today we have five activists who were taken out of Ukraine and sit in prisons in Russia, by the FSB, and the Ukrainian consuls and Ukrainian diplomats are not allowed to see them because they are considered to be citizens of Russia.”
Those who remain in Crimea and did not take Russian citizenship are not even considered residents of Crimea – they’re no one. “They can’t even buy a SIM card for their mobile phones because, in Russia, they do it after giving their Russian passport,” Mr. Klymenko added. “These people can’t find jobs. They can’t get medical treatment, can’t study and get pensions.”
Laws in Russia forbid foreigners from remaining on the territory of Russia for more than 90 days at a time, limited to twice a year. “So imagine the situation. A person was born in Yalta. He has a house in Yalta, children in Yalta, his mother is there, but he would be caught and they will tell him: leave, because you’ve been here 90 days. You have to leave and get back after that for another 90-day period,” Mr. Klymenko said.
Many people who decided to retain their Ukrainian passports will face more difficulty in 2016, Mr. Klymenko explained. Similar to the Nazi occupation during the second world war, Russia has set criminal penalties for hiding dual citizenship, and this year, such persons would be required to appear before official bodies. If he didn’t let know about the fact that he was aware of the violation, he would face a fine. But in 2016, those who refused Russian passports will be prevented from “marital and birth certificates, real estate, adoption – all of those issues are connected with those passport problems.”
The second technology employed by Russia is expelling disloyal citizens. “We could see the open abuse towards those people. They were kidnapped. They were beaten. There were searches in their houses, arrests. So, today, for each category of disloyal people, there is a technology of expelling [them] from the territory of Ukraine – from Crimea. For example, the journalists and civil activists.”
A “law” adopted in Crimea on May 9, 2014, stipulates that if a person states in public – like a store or a bus – that Russia annexed Crimea and is an occupier, the suspect can be imprisoned for up to three years. If done via broadcast, “in an Internet blog, even my own blog, and I have more than 3,000 subscribers, I can get up to five years.” Mr. Klymenko explained he and his editorial staff left Crimea on April 6, 2014. “That is when all staff of independent media left Crimea. And all my correspondents, my friends, all of them are working illegally because they know they can get five years.”
The other part of the disloyal population is Churches other than the Russian Orthodox Church – Moscow Patriarchate. There have been arson attacks on churches that under Russian laws imposed on the peninsula required new registrations – the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate, Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, Protestant communities.
Russian law also targeted NGOs, with many leaving Crimea after being designated “foreign agents” by Moscow.
Teachers of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian history also were subject to abuse, Mr. Klymenko added. These courses have been canceled at Crimean educational institutions, and many of these teachers have been forced to leave Crimea for lack of jobs.
The resulting situation is that the most active parts of civil society have left Crimea. The targeted priests are actually in the process of departure.
The pro-Ukrainian Crimean Tatars have been a major target for the occupying regime. Russia has attempted to use coercion on the Crimean Tatars via the Muslim community in Tatarstan, but that didn’t work. Later, Crimean Tatar leaders Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov were banned from entering Crimea. All of this was done in an attempt to split the Crimean Tatar community, but that didn’t happen. Attempts have continued, such as attacks on the Crimean Tatar assembly, the Mejlis. Future oppressions will escalate with the destruction of the Mejlis, he commented.
An “information ghetto” has been artificially created in Crimea by Russia. “They stopped all technical supplies of communication with the rest of Ukraine,” Mr. Klymenko said. “The last thing done was the liquidation of mobile phone operators, so only international roaming is possible there.” Russia also laid communication cables across the Kerch Strait from Russia to Crimea. All providers have been re-registered according to Russian law, which states that Internet bloggers have to keep the history of which websites they have been using and must turn over these records to police on the first demand or face detention.
The fifth technology used is the expropriation of property. “In Crimea, we had not nationalization, we actually had expropriation, and about 400 sites of Ukrainian property were expropriated, and during the last two months 300 piece of private enterprise were expropriated.”
“Why is Putin doing this?” Mr. Klymenko asked. The real reasons for Russia’s annexation of Crimea from a military perspective is that it can be used as a naval base/missile base, as a response to NATO’s base in Romania and a threat to Russian dominance of the Black Sea region (including NATO member Turkey, which holds sway over Syria). Mr. Klymenko suggested that more research and a follow-up report would be in order.
The basing of the Russian military in Crimea requires a loyal population, and the military base would also mean no investment and no economic development. So the 2.25 million people on the territory of this military base are actually out of place, Mr. Klymenko said. They shouldn’t be there.
Another reason for Russia’s annexation is the symbolic challenge that Mr. Putin threw to the U.S. and Great Britain at the same place where the Yalta meeting was held at the end of the second world war and as a challenge to the Budapest Memorandum. “I told my colleagues that some days ago, in an interview with the Izvestia newspaper, the head of the Russian Committee on International Affairs, Aleksey Pushkov, said that Russia shouldn’t actually promote human rights because these human rights are not a value of Russia.”
So, what to do? “These people will not be allowed to go to Crimea, and we get less and less information of what’s happening in Crimea. So the only way is to push Russia to go away from Crimea, and we are offering to initiate making a special strategy of de-occupation, through working on it, lobbying. And our organization, Maidan of International Affairs, in December in Kyiv showed the first variant of such a strategy, the strategy of getting Crimea back. It isn’t much,” Mr. Klymenko added, “but we need an international effort for that.”
The separation of the Donbas and Crimea in the sanctions is another bad development in the return of Crimea to Ukraine. This is actually what Mr. Putin wants, “to freeze the conflict in the Donbas and to forget about Crimea. I would say that, for the world, is more important than the Donbas, if we’re talking about long-scale development. Crimea is the first annexation since the second world war, and if we close our eyes on that it means that every person in the world can do anything in the world,” Mr. Klymenko said, adding, “We had such a situation when the world already closed its eyes on such a situation in the 1930s.”
There is a high level of optimism among “all of us and all of us in Ukraine,” he said. “We really believe that this issue can be solved. We believe that today in the world – we actually see the coalition of countries where many, many people say that the violation of human rights is a very serious issue and we wouldn’t accept what Putin says.”
Commentary
Mr. Lagon commented: “…the actions by Russia in Crimea, not only at the key points of events in February to March of last year, but since and currently today, are really quite crucial in terms of the free flow of information. There’s a campaign by Russia to suffuse the entire region in Europe with its view, and this report indicates a very tight grip on information. It’s possible to make outrageous claims about what people think among the population of Crimea, what actually happened, if you control the information and environment. This report focuses quite clearly on both how an information environment is controlled by Russia, and since then their very harsh limitations on how the media, how those who would use the public square, those who use social media can be able to operate.”
He continued: “In our own annual Freedom in the World Report, recently released, we see a more brazen use of coercive tactics by some of the autocratic powers of the world and by Putin. There is less of a language of using democracy, false trappings of democracy, more direct coercion, and we are quite concerned about the implications elsewhere. … There’s a playbook here. Putin has been using it in Georgia, in Moldova, when one sees the policy towards Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This is not new; this is just even more brazen.
“We must in particular focus on how those – for instance, Ukraine as a whole – would like to build connections with Western institutions. And while we should not only make sure that what happened in Crimea is not forgotten and sort of set aside – ‘Ah well, Putin will be satisfied with that’ – we need to focus on the bigger picture that Ukraine needs to be a success economically, politically, and there’s a big stake in that. We cannot think that Crimea will satisfy Putin. And we should make sure never to think that to stand for freedom, to stand for freedom of the press, to stand for human rights is a provocative act. To suggest that Ukraine, I mean, should be associated with Western institutions, it is a calamitous calumny to suggest that that is provocative. What Putin has done is provocative, and I’d just note that it’s quite worthwhile having had a report that focuses on the human rights aspects on top of the brazen military occupation that this whole affair represents.”
Mr. Kramer praised Mr. Klymenko’s report, and added: “There is no mention of Crimea in either Minsk agreement, and it’s critically important that we not forget that this situation didn’t start with Crimea – and I’ll say why – but it certainly is a key part of this crisis. …This started long before with Putin’s aversion to any neighbor’s effort to move toward the West, to integrate more closely with Europe, to democratize, to root out corruption, to respect human rights. Anything like that along Russia’s borders was viewed by Putin as a major threat. And when Ukraine was intent on signing the Association Agreement and a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU, for Putin that was a step too far. And he pressured Yanukovych, who sadly was all too willing to play along, not to sign the agreement, and we all know what that triggered.”
In his travels to Crimea in 2010 as part of the German Marshall Fund delegation during the first-round of the presidential elections, Mr. Kramer went to Symferopol and Sevastopol, where he reported little to no evidence of any separatist tendency among the people living in Crimea.
“And Andrii cites the various surveys, more recently in 2011, the Razumkov Center and others, that showed no interest really to speak of any separatist movement in Crimea, which gets at the root of the issue not just in Crimea but in eastern Ukraine, which is this is Russian-fomented. There wasn’t a separatist movement in Donetsk or Luhansk. It’s only because Russia has tried to gin one up that we see the terrible situation now,” he underscored.
Mr. Kramer also noted Foreign Affairs Minister Pavlo Klimkin’s statement in Japan recently that Ukraine would not normalize relations with Russia as long as there was no return to the status quo that included re-establishing Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the United Nations Human Rights Council how in Crimea and the separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine men, women and children were being killed, tortured, raped and sexually assaulted, arbitrarily detained, abducted for ransom, forced into labor, prosecuted and persecuted “because of who they are and where they worship. It is up to the Human Rights Council to shed light on it and to hold accountable those who violate those human rights,” Mr. Kramer noted.
“We cannot pawn this off onto the Human Rights Council and absolve ourselves of our own responsibility with this,” Mr. Kramer added.
It is also a military problem, as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip M. Breedlove noted, highlighting Crimea as a platform of power projection in the Black Sea region.
“So it is a military problem, as well as a human rights problem, as well as a problem about sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as about Russian aggression, which as Andrii and Mark have both said, it won’t stop here if it is not stopped. …Ukraine is on the verge of a meltdown, and we are standing back waiting for normal processes to take place. We can’t afford to do that.
“I would also argue it is critically important to help Ukraine militarily as well, to help the country defend itself against further Russian aggression and attack, and to do everything we can to ensure that Ukraine is able to join the Euro-Atlantic community, as so many of its people want to do.”