Twenty years ago, on March 29, 1995, the Russian Consulate in Crimea closed its doors following a demand from the Ukrainian government. The request was delivered via diplomatic note from Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to its Russian counterpart on March 24, 1995.
Ukraine’s Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Borys Tarasyuk said the Russian diplomats at the Russian Consulate in Symferopol were handling requests for Russian citizenship rather than offering services to Russian citizens on the peninsula.
“According to the Vienna Convention [on diplomatic activity], consulates should provide services to citizens of the country which they represent,” Mr. Tarasyuk said during a weekly meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kyiv on March 28, 1995.
Simultaneously, there was a row between Symferopol and Kyiv regarding the Crimean Parliament’s adoption of a Constitution and other laws that were out of line with Ukraine’s Constitution and laws. New elections for Crimea were called by Ukraine’s Parliament on June 25, 1995. It was decided that the election would be conducted according to Ukrainian laws and practices, and that the people of deported nations living in the Crimea (Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians and Germans) have a quota in the local elections.
Dmytro Stepaniuk, a national deputy from Dnipropetrovsk, traveled to Symferopol as part of a fact-finding mission following the banning of the illegal Crimean Constitution. Mr. Stepaniuk told lawmakers that he was aware of a secret letter from Crimean President Yuri Meshkov to Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Duma, asking for an increase in the number of Russian troops on the peninsula.
Criticizing the ouster of the prime minister of Crimea, Anatoliy Franchuk, as a “political action,” Mr. Stepaniuk said that 55 deputies out of the 98-member Crimean Parliament had no intention of working constructively within the framework of Ukrainian legislation and that most of the deputies were working in a destructive manner. “Their low-level professionalism does not allow them to work for the benefit of either Ukraine or Russia,” he added.
Source: “Russian Consulate in the Crimea closes its doors” and “Ukraine seeks restoration of Crimean PM,” by Marta Kolomayets, The Ukrainian Weekly, April 2, 1995.