Mustafa Dzhemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatars, said that the goal of his nation is “the establishment of a platform for the return of Crimea on the basis of the Budapest Memorandum,” the 1994 accord under which Russia and the West agreed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for its surrender of nuclear weapons.
The United States, Great Britain, Canada and other countries following the 2014 Crimean annexation declared that Moscow was in violation of the memorandum, but Vladimir Putin replied that, in fact, the Western powers were in breach by fomenting the Maidan in Ukraine, thereby sparking a revolution and creating a new state Moscow was not committed to support.
For the past four years, there the matter has stood; but Mr. Dzhemilev’s declaration, made to Ukrinform in Ankara suggests that the Crimean Tatars may now be ready to launch a new campaign to focus international attention on the 1994 accord, and that the West might now be ready to do more to compel compliance with the memorandum (ukrinform.ru/rubric-crimea/2611494-mustafa-dzemilev-lider-krymskih-tatar.html).
The Crimean Tatar leader lobbied for the passage of the U.N. resolution on the demilitarization of occupied Crimea on December 17 in large part because “there for the first time was a reference to the Budapest Memorandum.” It is “very important,” he noted, that the United Nations specified that Russia’s militarization of Crimea is “a violation of the Budapest memorandum.”
“Our next goal,” Mr. Dzhemilev said, “is the creation of a platform for the return of Crimea on the basis of the Budapest Memorandum. We will continue work in this direction.” While in Washington, he met with U.S. congressmen who expressed their support for this effort. Moscow will oppose it, but its opposition “is not that important,” he commented.
The Crimean Tatar leader said that, when speaking with Western leaders, he has more than once said that if the West had treated the Russian occupation of Georgian territory as an occupation, “the occupation of Crimea would not have happened.” But, unfortunately, Western governments did not do so.
And then he added: “I do not exclude that the peninsula can be de-occupied at the price of the disintegration of Russia. The stupidities Putin is acting upon could lead to that.”
Paul Goble is a long-time specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. The article above is reprinted with permission from his blog called “Window on Eurasia” (http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/).