March 18 marked the fifth anniversary of the Russian takeover of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Why March 18? That was the date when Russian President Vladimir Putin, with great fanfare in Moscow, signed a treaty that made Crimea part of the Russian Federation. That spectacle followed the March 16 “referendum” in Crimea, which purported to show that nearly 97 percent of voters in Crimea favored “reunification” with Russia – no matter that the voting took place under conditions of military occupation, literally at gunpoint. Furthermore, Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians and others who wanted to remain part of Ukraine largely boycotted the vote, which they saw as unconstitutional and predetermined; while “political tourists” were allowed to cast their ballots. And before that illegal referendum, of course, came the arrival on the peninsula of the “little green men,” who wore unmarked military uniforms but carried Russian weapons – impromptu “self-defense groups,” according to Mr. Putin, who later admitted that Russian special forces were involved.
Ukraine’s acting president at the time, Oleksandr Turchynov, wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times on March 12, 2014, that Russia’s “brazen and unjustified aggression, thinly veiled as ‘protecting Russian speakers,’ pursues an obvious goal: to weaken and dismember Ukraine, to create another zone of instability in Europe and to arrest the process of European integration.”
Meanwhile, Russia said that Crimea was merely “reintegrated” and claimed that its annexation was necessary to protect Crimea’s Russian population. Today, Russia continues to insist that the people of Crimea “made their choice exercising the right to self-determination embodied in the U.N. Charter by means of a free and peaceful vote in conformity with all international standards.” Those are the words of Russia’s ambassador to Ireland, Yuriy Filatov (source: Irish Examiner, March 20).
Thankfully, no one’s buying that.
NATO strongly condemned Russia’s acts of 2014 and stated: “We call on Russia to return control of Crimea to Ukraine. We reiterate our full support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders and territorial waters. Crimea is the territory of Ukraine.”
British Foreign Affairs Minister Jeremy Hunt stated: “I condemn the illegal annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, Ukraine, five years ago. The U.K. will never recognize Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and we call on Russia to end their illegitimate control of the peninsula and their attempts to redraw the boundaries of Europe.”
Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne underlined that Australia does not “recognize any actions seeking to legitimize the annexation of Crimea or the secession of parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.”
Here in the United States, Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker reiterated that “This is an illegal occupation, an illegal seizure of territory, and we fundamentally stand behind Ukraine in insisting that its territorial integrity be restored,” and the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Crimea Annexation Non-recognition Act (HR 596) that bans the U.S. government from recognizing Crimea as Russian territory.
In Canada, new sanctions were announced in response to Russia’s aggression in the Black Sea and the Kerch Strait, as well as the illegal annexation of Crimea. At the same time, the European Union and the U.S. also imposed new sanctions.
Bottom line: The world has underscored yet again that Crimea is Ukraine.