What is the 1992 constitution?
See, that’s a tough question. Constitution of Crimea - Wikipedia
First, in 1992 Crimea passed a Constitution declaring its full independence. Then, days later, it inserted a clause in there that made Crimea part of Ukraine. Then, a month or so later, Crimea was made an “Autonomous Republic” in Ukraine.
So, it is your guess (and the referendum voter’s) which of the three would be “restored” with the “yes” vote to the second question - full independence, part of Ukraine or “Autonomous Republic”. A bit confusing, right?
I think most people would feel that the Ukrainians have the right the change the Ukrainian government. And the Crimeans have the right to change the Crimean government. But the Russians don’t have the right to change the Ukrainian or Crimean government.
Good point. And I’ll add one point that has not yet been mentioned here: Ukrainian law allows for an independence vote. All you have to do is collect 3 million signatures for it, and then you have a national referendum on the issue. So it’s fair to say that this referendum was bound to take place, what’s wrong is the circumstances under which it will happen.
I think you must have watched another revolution than the one in Ukraine. Most of your statements are false or misguided. The protestors were armed with clubs, sledgehammers, molotov cocktails and firearms and multiple policemen were killed before the day with mass casualties. Hundreds were injured.
In most situations the police have shown a huge amount of restraint, not even using their firearms while being pelted with molotov cocktails and several officers are caught on fire. I could link videos, but it’s pretty easy to find if you have the slightest interest in the situation. Some policemen were pummeled to death, some strangled and some by gunshot wounds. I’d like to see how other police forces would have handled that kind of situation.
The snipers killing most of the protestors are not yet identified. Police were themselves taking unknown sniper fire, and were searching for where it came from. They deny that any orders were given to shoot protestors. Of course you can’t just take their word for that, but my point is that nobody really knows as of yet who carried out the killings, or who ordered them.
Then at the 21st of february, Yanukovich and the opposition leaders signed an agreement to have an early election and restore the consitution to its state in 2004, and the police retreated. The protestors disregarded this agreement signed by their leaders, and took the opportunity to take full control of Kiev, including the parliament. At this point Yanukovych had no control over the city and had to flee for his own safety. I’d very much call this being forced from power by physical force. He would have been lynched had he stayed in the city.
Now to the farcical “impeachment”. The mob was in control of the streets and the parliament. Many MP:s of the Party of Regions had to flee for their safety, and all proceedings. including the impeachment process were carried out under threat of violence by the armed mob outside. Sure, that is completely equivalent to how a US President is impeached.
Sure, Yanukovych was terribly corrupt. Nobody really denies that. The same goes for pretty much any government Ukraine has had. But to say the protestors did not kill, and that Yanukovych was not overthrown by force and deposed legally, is absolutely ridiculous.
No, if anyone is spreading misinformation it is you. The protests were not particularly violent, there have been several protects and riots in the United States where some small number of people were killed, buildings burned etc. That doesn’t give the government carte blanche to start massacring civilians with targeted gunfire. If you don’t believe the soldiers were ordered to fire on the protesters then I think you’re being extremely naive.
The Parliament building was not occupied by protesters when they voted for impeachment. This even shows pictures of Parliament when the vote was happening, people are standing around relaxed, well dressed and happy. The building is not occupied by armed thugs.
Did Yanukovych need to flee? Most likely he did, but I suspect if he had surrendered to authorities on the many counts of murder and corruption against him the protesters would have been satisfied with seeing him tried.
As for the agreement, the protesters were not bound to accept the terms of it. Their leaders accepted it and the people rejected it, that’s the core of democracy. What happened in Ukraine was certainly uglier than us pushing Nixon out, but Ukraine is relatively new as an independent country, much poorer, and with a much rougher recent history than the United States. All told I think the Orange Revolution has been remarkably restrained, very few people have been killed, and they actually followed the law in their country. Now yes, part of the reason they were able to impeach Yanukovych was because of defections from his party and some members still loyal to him fleeing–but when a bunch of criminals who know they are about to be in trouble run away that’s not a failure of democracy. The only failure is they didn’t capture them before they could escape to Russia.
So why was no vote held prior to March of 2014? Crimea’s had many years to hold a vote on independence; all this time it’s had its own parliament and has been a semi-autonomous and governing region. Is the replacement of one amazingly corrupt President actually the tipping point? It’s not as if Crimea lost its representation in Parliament.
It certainly does make a difference in that the outcome is no longer democratically legitimate. You can claim the Crimeans would have voted for independence anyway, but the only evidence that would matter would be if that referendum had actually happened.
If tomorrow Nova Scotia votes by a substantial majority to secede from Canada and join the United States, that would be a result worthy of an appropriate consultation and negotiation over Nova Scotian secession. If they were to make such a vote only after the United States had sent in divisions of troops to “oversee” the vote, it would be bullshit, and everyone would know it’s bullshit.
I’m not convinced I would want Nova Scotia, how valuable are the fisheries these days and what access do we already have to them?
I do think it’s interesting to wonder why Crimea had not moved for independence and union with Russia. I suspect it’s a complicated nexus of:
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During the early 90s when the Soviet Union had just fallen, Russia was in a bad place economically and stability wise, so was not a really attractive spouse.
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Given the autonomous nature Crimea had under the Ukrainian constitution there was no big impetus for change.
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While I do suspect a majority of Crimeans feel more allegiance to Russia than Ukraine, I think the tourism industry trumps those nationalist concerns in normal circumstances. By far the vast majority of tourists coming into Crimea (which is a poor region and tourism is its biggest industry) are Ukrainian, so a split from Ukraine might endanger that flow of tourist money.
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Crimea could not survive as an independent state without significantly increasing taxes. I think their outright deficit every year is something like $300m, and the total value of subsidies from the rest of Ukraine to Crimea is over $1bn a year. You can’t close that gap without raising taxes, and the average monthly income in Crimea is low, something like $400 a month. Unless Crimea knew for certain a powerful country willing to continue propping up its finances was willing to embrace it, a split from Ukraine could/would have been disastrous. Until the recent moves in the Russian legislature it wasn’t all that obvious Russia (which itself runs at a deficit and has fiscal problems) would want to take on the burden of propping up Crimea.
The US occupied Iraq during its vote, but there’s no problem there. The US occupied Germany during its vote. Again, no problem. The US has occupied Afghanistan, Japan, and South Korea during their votes. I guess it’s no problem and just a coincidence that all of these countries elected leaders who take orders from the Empire. If Mexico had erupted into revolucion, the US would invade in order to “make it safe for Democracy”, and guess what? A pro-US crony would assume power in Mexico.
Well, I’d say there were many problems in Iraq, actually. Again, we aren’t talking about Iraq. We’re talking about Crimea. (How long has it been since Japan, South Korea, and Germany held a “vote” under U.S. occupation?)
Yes, the United States has done bad things. So have Belgium, Spain, China, the United Kingdom, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, France, Italy, and most countries, really. That does not excuse Russia.
No, what excuses Russia is that protecting people from fascists and ensuring that they can, if they choose, become independent is not a bad thing. That’s the thing people are missing, that Russia is the entity acting morally here. The US cannot claim that what Russia is doing is wrong, because they have done the same thing repeatedly and accepted it’s the right thing to do.
Even if you disagree, you think that Russia is wrong and that people should be governed by unelected neo-Nazis, the US still has no grounds to say they’re wrong, as it’s spent the last 60 or so years attempting to decide who governs who.
Except for the two little details that the people in charge of the Ukraine now aren’t fascists, and that there’s no proposal for the Crimea to become independent.
Well the United States still exercises control over the South Korean military and has roughly 25000 troops stationed there. The US has about 40000 troops in Japan. 50000 in Germany. You can draw whatever conclusions about whether or not this amounts to an occupation. I’d say there is definitely an effect on how these governments operate.
In any case, i do not excuse Russia. That’s silly demagoguery. I simply do not excuse hypocrisy from the US government and lapdog media who gesticulate wildly about the relatively mild encroachment of Ukraine “sovereignty”, while the US policy elite operates an enormous Empire bringing hellfire and death on hundreds of thousands of innocent brown people.
A key difference is that the United States did not initiate any of those wars. Japan and Germany declared war on the United States and North Korea invaded South Korea. But Russia chose to start this war.
Yeah, there’s a difference between wars of conquest and aggression and all of the wars Will is complaining about. Including the Iraq war, I know it’s a punch line but there actually was a large coalition (many of them first world countries with strong respect for international law) that supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There is literally no country in the world that has really come out in support of Russia’s actions. Take the invasion of Iraq, which I know most here believe to have been an illegal/illegitimate action, and ask yourself how that action had over 40+ countries that stood by the United States and this action by Russia has zero (at least last I heard, although maybe the independent countries of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, or Belarus, might have said positive things about it.)
There’s also another key difference in terms of hypocrisy, the OP is asking why we were okay with Yanukovych being forced out of power but not okay with the Crimean referendum. I think that’s a pretty straight forward answer and it’s been given. Digging into the weeds on whether or not it’s hypocrisy to complain about a naked invasion of a sovereign country solely for the purpose of annexing territory (which was never our goal in Iraq, and that was a country under massive sanctions by the entire world for repeated violations of chemical weapons agreements and humanitarian violations) versus other very dissimilar things the United States has done isn’t a particularly interesting debate. It’s about as interesting as people who try to say there are fascists in power in Ukraine when the Ukrainian Jewish community actually penned a letter to Putin exposing the lie behind it while pointing out that Jewish communities feel much less safe in Putin’s Russia.
Yes, if only Putin had paid such bribes he too could have had the support of mighty international legalists Micronesia. The war in Iraq was a war of conquest and aggression, and that you try to portray it otherwise just shows your complete moral bankruptcy.
This Crimea thing, on the other hand, is much more like Kosovo. In both cases a major power seems to have decided to carve a chunk out of a sovereign nation for its own reasons, and to have pursued this by trumping up claims that they were protecting victims of ethnic violence, then occupying the territory in question for a quicky referendum. There are some differences, of course. The Crimea is being occupied by soldiers, who as yet haven’t even shot anyone, while Kosovo was heavily bombed, overwhelmingly targeting civilian targets such as bridges and electrical infrastructure. The Russians haven’t actually taken Crimea away from the Ukraine yet, although it may end up that way. The fears of ethnic violence by the fascist junta in Kiev never materialised, whereas there was actual violence in Kosovo, albeit mainly perpetrated by the group the Americans supported an eventually put in power, the drug running Islamists of the KLA. Obviously the Crimea hasn’t had its referendum yet, either.
Svoboda have been quite open about their position that the genocidal anti-semite Stepan Bandera is a hero of the Ukraine, and that the Ukraine before the recent coup was controlled by a Moscow-Jew cabal. This letter you mention may exist, it may even have been written by Ukrainian Jews, but it doesn’t disprove those facts.
The three leaders of the victorious now-former opposition were Tyanybok, a quite open fascist, Klitchko who admittedly is more of an authoritarian, or quasi-fascist, and our man Yatsenyuk, who openly stated that he only wanted to be in power to do things the voters would never countenance.
These old IMF policies, now being forced on the Ukraine, for example: http://www.kommersant.ua/docs/2014/20140305_minfin_plan.pdf
Cutting pensions for old people in half
Cutting payment for health workers
No more preferential services and medicine for people in hospitals
Closing small business support fund
Cutting number of government grants to young researchers
so on.
Funny that you completely fail to mention Yulia Timoshenko, who may be many things - including the most recognisable opposition figure - but is certainly not a fascist.
Or the fact that Ukraine’s two largest opposition parties are members of the European People’s Party… conservative, but certainly not fascist.
Who do you think is ‘excusing’ Russia? Obama’s enacted some sanctions? That is fine with me. But what about the double-standard. Who sanctioned the menaces to world peace and security in 2003? Did the US and UK suffer any sanctions … Kicked out of the G8? Perhaps they did, I didn’t hear about it.
And what extent of death and destruction has Putin’s actions amounted to thus far compared to all the other violations of international law you mentioned?
Tell me? Would you support belated major sanctions against the US and UK and any country that sent troops and equipment into Iraq in March 2003 when the UNSC had the WMD situation well in hand? We in the US just walked away from it mostly with an attitude that it was ‘ooops’ my bad.
Putin doesn’t get an “ooooops my bad” does he?