February 20, 2014 6:50 pm
Russia rattles sabre over fate of Crimea
Russia is prepared to fight a war over the Ukrainian territory of Crimea to protect the ethnic Russian population and its military base there, a senior government official has told the FT.
“If Ukraine breaks apart, it will trigger a war,” the official said. “They will lose Crimea first [because] we will go in and protect [it], just as we did in Georgia.” In August 2008, Russian troops invaded Georgia after the Georgian military launched a surprise attack on the separatist region of South Ossetia in an effort to establish its dominance over the republic.
ON THIS STORY
Russia later recognised the independence of South Ossetia and another separatist region, Abkhazia, but is the only major country to have done so.
The brief conflict with Georgia pitted Russia indirectly against the US and Nato, which had earlier tried to put Georgia on a path to Nato membership. The Kremlin regards the Georgian conflict as the biggest stand-off between Russia and the west since the end of the Cold War and it has fed determination in Moscow to push back against what it believes to be western attempts to contain Russia.
The warning of a similar scenario comes becauseUkraine’s civil conflict has fanned tension in Crimea. On the peninsula, located on the northern coast of the Black Sea where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is stationed, ethnic Russians make up almost 60 per cent of the population, with Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars accounting for the rest.
Volodymyr Konstantinov, speaker of Crimea’s parliament, said on Thursday that the region might try to secede from Ukraine if the country split. “It is possible, if the country breaks apart,” he told the Russian news agency Interfax. “And everything is moving towards that.” Russian media also quoted him as saying Crimeans might turn to Russia for protection.
Mr Konstantinov discussed the Ukraine crisis with Russian lawmakers including Sergey Naryshkin, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, or Duma, in Moscow on Thursday.
The Kremlin has been eager to stress that it is not interfering in Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he was sending Vladimir Lukin, a liberal former diplomat who now serves as the government’s human rights commissioner, to Kiev as a mediator. But Mr Putin’s spokesman emphasised that this was at the request of Viktor Yanukovich, Ukraine’s president.
However, many government officials say in private that Ukraine falls inside Russia’s sphere of influence. “We will not allow Europe and the US to take Ukrainefrom us. The states of the former Soviet Union, we are one family,” said a foreign policy official. “They think Russia is still as weak as in the early 1990s but we are not.”
In depth
Kiev is facing its most serious crisis since independence in 1991 in a dispute over trade links with the EU and Russia
Apart from its military importance, Crimea is historically valued by Russians more than other Ukrainian regions because of the controversy over the decision by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev – himself Ukrainian-born – to sign it over to Ukraine from Russia in 1954.
Ihor Smeshko, who steered Ukraine away from violence when he was in charge of the SBU state security service during the 2004 Orange Revolution, said the desire of the Crimeans to break away and join Russia was an artificially engineered issue. “I don’t understand how [Mr Konstantinov’s] comments, which carry an obvious threat to the territorial integrity of Ukraine, are not immediately investigated by the SBU,” he said.
The president of the Crimean Tartars’ assembly called Mr Konstantinov’s comments “treason”, further raising the possibility of ethnic conflict if Crimea were to separate.
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