Crimea Scene Investigation
Ukraine's national awakening can seem like chauvinism
and oppression to Russian and Tatar Crimeans.

By Joshua Kucera
Updated Friday, Feb. 27, 2009, at 6:55 AM ET
From: Joshua Kucera

Subject: Is Ukraine Next?

Posted Monday, Feb. 23, 2009, at 12:02 PM ET

KIEV, Ukraine—At the end of Kiev's main street, Khreschatyk, with its advertisements for
mail-order-bride agencies and posh boutiques selling $3,000 opossum-fur duffel bags, stands a monument
to an older Ukraine. Two burly 20-foot-tall members of the proletariat—one Russian, one Ukrainian
—stand manfully, chests thrust forward, together holding up a five-pointed star inscribed with the hammer
and sickle and the words "Friendship of Nations." The formerly exalted spot is now somewhat cheapened
by the presence of a few rickety attractions, like bumper cars and a shooting range where you can plink
empty beer cans with a Kalashnikov-shaped air rifle.
Monuments like this are usually a good barometer for how a former Soviet republic feels about its
relationship with Russia. Lithuania, which sprinted as fast as possible from Russia after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, has moved its Soviet-era statues to a museum park, and Estonia even went so far as to
remove a World War II memorial from the center of its capital city. On the other end of the spectrum,
Lenin still stands tall in the central square of Minsk, the capital of Belarus, a country that regularly
entertains proposals to reunite with Russia.
Ukraine is a bit more ambivalent. The Friendship of Nations monument stands next to a panoramic lookout
spot over the Dnieper River, and most people who come to the monument barely pay it any attention; it's
just something they pass by to get to the view. The base's inscription (a relief text that read "In
Commemoration of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia") has been removed, though the outline of
the letters is still visible because decades of pollution discolored the background around them. The statue
now sports a little Ukrainian nationalist graffiti. But the Russian and Ukrainian workers still stand side by
side.
The friendship between Russia and Ukraine is on the rocks these days. The 2004 Orange Revolution
brought in pro-Western leaders who have prioritized joining NATO and the European Union to the
detriment of Kiev's ties to Moscow. The summer 2008 war between Georgia and Russia ratcheted up the
tension even more: Ukraine sold arms to Georgia (some secretly, Russia and a few Ukrainians allege), and
its president, Viktor Yushchenko, flew to Georgia to show Ukraine's support. Meanwhile, Russian navy
ships based in Ukraine ferried troops to Georgia and sank one Georgian coast guard vessel.
Immediately after the dust settled in Georgia, speculation had it that Ukraine was next in Russia's sights.
(Google "Is Ukraine next?" to see just how much speculation.) Like Georgia, Ukraine has NATO
aspirations and a president dedicated to moving away from Moscow and toward the United States and
Europe. And it has Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea where most of the population is not Ukrainian but
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ethnic Russian. It also hosts a large Russian naval base. Although Crimea is still firmly under Ukrainian
control, Russia can turn up the heat there when it wants to. Shortly after the war in Georgia, I ran into a
Russian diplomat I know in Washington; I asked him what came next. He grinned and said, "Watch
Crimea." While the world's attention has lately been focused on the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute, the issue
of Crimea holds more long-term potential for conflict.
But while the situations in Ukraine and Georgia have several ominous parallels, they are also different in
important ways. Ukraine is much larger—a population of 46 million, 10 times as large as Georgia's—with a
much stronger military. Georgians, traditionally mountain dwellers, have a legendarily fiery temperament,
while Ukrainians' reputation is more as mild-mannered farmers. The Ukrainian population itself is divided:
While independence has allowed Ukrainian nationalism to flourish, especially in the western part of the
country, 17 percent of Ukrainian citizens are ethnic Russians and many others still look to Moscow for
cultural and political orientation. Public support for NATO membership hovers in the 30 percent range,
while in Georgia it's more than 80 percent.
Perhaps most important, though, Ukrainians share a long history and a cultural affinity with Russians.
While Russia's relations with Georgia date only to the 18th century, the histories of Ukraine and Russia
have been inseparable for more than 1,000 years. Kiev was the site of the first great Slavic civilization,
Kievan Rus, established in the 10th century. When the Mongols sacked Kiev in 1240, the city fell into
decline, and the center of Slavic civilization shifted to Moscow (which had been founded by a prince from
Kiev in 1147). Russians and Ukrainians still dispute whose country is the true successor of Kievan Rus. A
Russian proverb says that Moscow is the heart of Russia and St. Petersburg is its head—but Kiev is its
mother. Russia values these inter-Slavic ties highly; its low birth rates and high death rates create the
potential that Russians will, over time, become demographically overwhelmed by the non-Slavic minorities
that surround Russia.
I recently traveled through Ukraine to try to see whether my diplomat friend—and everyone else—was
right. Was Ukraine next in Russia's sights? No one knows, of course, probably not even at the Kremlin.
But if there is an eventual conflict in Crimea between Russia and Ukraine, we'll be able to point fingers in
many directions: Moscow, for fomenting anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Crimea; Kiev, for pursuing clumsy
nationalist policies that alienate Russians in Ukraine; Crimean Russians, for stubbornly holding onto the
Soviet past rather than focusing on a future in an independent Ukraine; and Western governments, in
particular the United States, for supporting the Ukrainian government so enthusiastically that Kiev feels
emboldened to act more rashly than it otherwise might.
The shared history of Russia and Ukraine is a double-edged sword. Over and over, people in
Ukraine—both pro-Russian and pro-Western—told me that Ukraine and Russia would never fight because
of their close historical and cultural ties. But, I wondered, had close ties helped the Croats and Serbs, the
Union and Confederacy, Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shiites, or countless other groups of compatriots-turnedenemies?
Russia's roots in Ukraine make the stakes much higher here—the loss of Ukraine to the west
would be felt more keenly in Moscow than would the loss of Georgia, and so Russia will be willing to try
harder and to risk more to keep it in its sphere of influence.
In addition, Ukrainians have centuries of grievances against Russia on which to draw and a walk through
Kiev's grand old center provides plenty of reminders. Just across from the golden-domed St. Sophia's
cathedral (which dates from 1037 and whose connection to Kievan Rus history probably spared it from
destruction under the Soviets) and in the shadow of a gleaming Hyatt hotel is an equestrian statue of
Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Ukrainian Cossack leader who signed a peace deal with Russia in 1654.
Ukrainians now criticize the deal as having sold out the country, resulting in Ukraine's subjugation to
Russia. (The statue, erected in the czarist era, points toward Moscow.)
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Just across the cobblestoned street is a small monument commemorating those who starved during the
Soviet collectivization of the 1930s; in November 2008, the Ukrainian government inaugurated a new,
much larger monument to the famine. Between 3 million and 6 million Ukrainians died, and historical
opinion in Ukraine is increasingly reaching the conclusion that the famine was a deliberate genocide
against the Ukrainian people perpetrated from Moscow, rather than the unintended consequence of
collectivization—something that Russian historians hotly dispute and that has become another issue of
contention between the two countries.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who never misses an opportunity to needle Russia, attended the
new monument's inauguration. In his remarks, Saakashvili said current Russian attempts to deny the
genocide show that "the ideology of evil remains alive. Even 75 years after the tragedy, the seeds of evil
still grow in some individuals." Meanwhile, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev sent a letter to President
Yushchenko complaining that "the tragic events of the 1930s are being used in Ukraine in order to achieve
instantaneous and conformist political goals."
The Georgia war was a watershed moment for this part of the world. It demonstrated vividly that the
balance of power here had tipped. Georgia was the most loyal ally the United States had in the former
Soviet Union, and when America failed to come to Georgia's aid, Russia essentially called Washington's
bluff—they were willing to use force to defend their interests, and the United States wasn't. The advances
Washington had made in the last two decades—expanding NATO, building new oil and gas pipelines,
establishing military relations—suddenly looked a lot more fragile.
I had been wondering whether this was causing other U.S. allies in the former Soviet Union to have second
thoughts about throwing in their lot with Washington. So I arranged a meeting with Boris Tarasyuk, an
elder statesman of Ukrainian diplomacy and Yushchenko's first foreign minister. If he was having second
thoughts, he wasn't admitting it. In fact, he was offended by the very premise of my question.
"Ukraine is not Georgia. The Georgian situation is not the same as the Ukrainian situation. So you cannot
speak as if you are speaking about similar situations. This is a completely wrong conceptual approach. You
should not speak in these terms," he said. "In Ukraine there are no territories outside of its control.
Ukraine, by its size, is not comparable to Georgia. Ukraine has one of the largest armed forces in Europe,
so one cannot compare the military capabilities of Georgia with those of Ukraine. This is a rather serious
situation, to attack Ukraine militarily, because the consequences of such a confrontation would affect the
whole of Europe. I am of the opinion that this is understood by both sides."
Still, he admitted that Russia has the same kind of designs on Ukraine that it does on Georgia. "Their
strategic foreign-policy objective is to impose domination over Ukraine," he said. And Ukrainian fear has
only grown since the war in Georgia: Polls showed that 47 percent of Ukrainians felt less secure as a result
of the war. "What happened in Georgia convinced many people in Ukraine, especially those in charge, to
pay adequate attention to the quality of its armed forces and the necessity to allocate adequate funding for
making the armed forces modern, well-equipped, and ready." (After the Georgia war, Ukraine's defense
minister called for the military budget to be more than tripled from 2008 to 2009.)
"We are always using all means to protect our interests," he said. Then he added, "And at the same time,
we are not provoking any unpredictable results. We have to calculate first, what is the challenge, how to
cope with the challenge in an effective way, and not to cause unexpected result. In this sense, Ukrainians
are different from Georgians."

Did he think it was inevitable that Russia would try to conquer Ukraine? "Looking at history, the Russian
elite was always trying to enlarge Russia at the expense of its neighbors and to pursue the policy of
imperial quest. You can trace this deep into history," he said. "In the past there was no Russia, there was
Moscow kingdom, and they called it Muscovia, it was only at the beginning of the 18th century that Peter
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the Great invented the name Russia, thus taking the historic name of what was known as Kievan Rus."
Tarasyuk quickly sketched a history of Ukraine in which, consistently, the only thing to come from the
east was trouble—from the wars that ended in Khmelnytsky's 1654 peace deal to the formation of the
Soviet Union to the famine. So what did Tarasyuk think of the monument to the Friendship of Nations? He
paused, and smiled. "I don't see any danger in the friendship of nations."
From: Joshua Kucera
Subject: Simferopol Is the Conspiracy-Theory Capital of Crimea
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009, at 7:19 AM ET
SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine—Listening to Russians can be a lot like listening to Ron Paul. Much of what they
say is refreshing, speaking truth to power. The hypocrisy inherent in the U.S. foreign policy of cloaking
realpolitik in the rhetoric of "nation building" and "democracy promotion"? The Russians get it. But just
when you're starting to see their side of things, they drop a conspiracy theory to rival the secret plan to
adopt the Amero.
Take Sergei Kiselev, a leading scholar of post-Soviet geopolitics and a geography professor at Tavrichesky
National University, the largest university in Crimea. I interviewed him at his office in Simferopol, the
capital of Crimea, and he made some important arguments about Ukrainian politicians pushing NATO for
their own political gain and about the excesses of Ukrainian nationalism.
And then he explained why Crimea, unlike many other analogous territories, remained peaceful after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. There are a variety of theories for this, but Kiselev offered a novel one.
"Look at the map of Eurasia—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Transdniester, Abkhazia,
South Ossetia, Nagorno Karabakh, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Xinjiang,
Tibet. All of these places have had war. But not Crimea. Why?" he asked. "Russians, in their blood, have a
genetic aversion to violence. Russians absorb violence like a pillow," he said. "This isn't nationalism, this is
analysis and observation."
Later, he outlined a "well-known plan" of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko to widen the war from
Georgia into Ukraine. The plan, Kiselev said, involved provoking a conflict between the Russian and
Ukrainian navies in the Black Sea, blowing up the Russian consulate in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv,
and occupying several Russian-operated lighthouses on the Crimean coast. For good measure, the plan
apparently included the bombing of a synagogue in Dniepropetrovsk, an industrial city just to the north of
Crimea. What a synagogue had to do with a war between Ukraine and Russia, he didn't explain, but
presumably a conspiracy seemed incomplete without somehow including the Jews. This plot, he said, was
foiled only because the Ukrainian interior minister had exposed it. I hadn't heard any of this, so I checked
back with journalists I had met in Kiev. None of it, of course, was true.
Crimea was, in fact, part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic until 1954, when Khrushchev changed
the internal borders to give it to Ukraine. Why he did so is not clear. Russians argue that it was because he
was Ukrainian and that he was drunk when he made the decision; some have tried to dispute the legality of
the hand-over. There is some geographical logic to the move: Crimea is connected to mainland Ukraine by
a thin isthmus, but it's not connected to Russia. (These days traveling between Crimea and Russia requires
a short ferry ride; Russia has been trying to build a bridge, but Ukraine has blocked the efforts.) Politically,
though, Crimea leans Russian. More than half of the peninsula's residents are ethnic Russians, and many of
the Ukrainians there have pro-Russia sympathies. In the 2004 presidential elections that precipitated the
Orange Revolution, the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, got more than 80 percent of the vote
in Crimea. Until recently, the Communist Party, which supports Ukraine reintegrating with Russia,
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dominated the regional parliament.
In Simferopol, it's easy to imagine you're in Russia rather than Ukraine. Everyone speaks Russian, and
most signs, TV and radio programs, and ads are in Russian. Visually, the city is remarkable mainly for its
lack of local flavor. It has pretty much everything you find in the average post-Soviet city of 400,000
people—concrete, short skirts and furs, sad babushkas selling cigarettes in cold underpasses—and nothing
you wouldn't. The local economy, as in most of these sorts of places, seems to be driven mainly by coffee,
cell phones, and lingerie.
I came here by overnight train after a week in Kiev, where, for the most part, I heard the point of view that
I could get from Washington: Russia is a threat; Ukraine will benefit from membership in NATO and the
European Union; the West, by promoting democracy and NATO membership, is representing Ukrainians'
real interests against Russian interference and malfeasance. All this is at least partly true, but there is
considerable room for skepticism as well, and I was looking forward to hearing the other side.
There was, to take a small example, the question of Russian passports. Most of the "Is Ukraine Next?"
stories that appeared after the Georgia war repeated the same ominous detail: The Russian consulate in
Simferopol had been handing out Russian passports en masse (as many as 70,000) to residents of Crimea.
This was ominous because Russia had done the same thing in the Georgian breakaway republics of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia—it gave nearly everyone there a Russian passport, which then provided a pretext
when Moscow wanted to intervene: It was protecting its citizens.
When I was in Kiev, several government officials repeated this story, but usually with the caveat that
"there were reports from Simferopol ..." This caveat suggested two things to me: Either they were making
the story up and hiding behind "reports" to dodge responsibility, or they really didn't know what was going
on in Crimea. After spending time in Crimea, I eventually determined that both were probably true. But I
found no evidence that there was any attempt by Russia to co-opt Crimea's residents, as in South Ossetia.
While it's impossible to prove a negative, I asked a lot of people in Simferopol of varying political
motivations, and no one had seen any evidence of a mass passport giveaway. (I tried and failed to get
comment from the Russian Consulate.)

But other than pointing out where their enemies are wrong, what are the Russians offering? Since the end
of the Cold War and the discrediting of communism, the Western ideal of democracy and free markets has
not been much challenged. But as it has gotten stronger and more assertive during the Putin era, Russia has
begun to mount a geopolitical challenge to the West. It's bolstering alliances with other countries that want
to challenge American hegemony, places like Iran, Venezuela, and China. But it's not yet clear whether
Russia is putting forth any sort of new principle to challenge the West. In Simferopol, the people I talked
to—generally pro-Russian think tankers, journalists, and analysts—did not appear to have any new
ideology. I did, however, see impressive advances in the fields of conspiracy theories, hysterical
overreactions, and dubious logic.
A friend had recommended that I talk with a journalist at Krimskaya (Crimean) Pravda, but when I
reached the reporter, he suggested that I talk instead to the editor-in-chief. As the name suggests (and as
the hammer and sickle on the front page drive home), the paper is a leftover from Soviet days. But the
editor, Konstantin Bakharev, is young, dynamic, and English-speaking. He put out little bottles of Vitel
water, imported from France, that I later learned cost about $7 in Simferopol.
(The Russians I met in Crimea, it should be noted, were extraordinarily hospitable. While the people I met
in Kiev were generally all business, in Crimea no meeting took place without coffee or tea and a tray of
cookies. And while interviewees are usually looking at their watches by the 45-minute mark, the Russians
I met in Crimea would happily talk for two hours or more—until my head ached, my translator was
exhausted, and my voice recorder was out of memory.)
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Bakharev challenged the notion, still widely held in Kiev and Washington, that Russia had unilaterally
started the war with Georgia. He's right. But then he went a step further, and argued that Washington had
pulled strings in Georgia to start the war. His "proof," as he put it? His father-in-law was recently traveling
in Georgia, and on his way from the airport, he noticed a road being built. Black men—not an everyday
sight in Georgia—were doing the construction. When he got to Tbilisi, he asked one of his government
contacts what the story was with the black guys working on the road. The explanation was that
Washington was funding the construction of the road but didn't trust the Georgian government not to steal
the money—so they'd sent their own road workers. He concluded triumphantly: "So, if the U.S. doesn't
trust Georgia to build a road by themselves, do you think they would trust them to start a war?"
From: Joshua Kucera
Subject: Crimean Tatars Are the Wild Card of the Region
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009, at 6:51 AM ET
BAKHCHISARAY, Ukraine—The stone minarets of the 15th-century Khan's Palace that dominate the
skyline here, a city of about 50,000 a 30-minute bus ride south from Simferopol, are a reminder that while
today Ukraine and Russia are jousting over Crimea, for most of the past millennium, another group ruled
the peninsula: the Crimean Tatars. Muslims and speakers of a language closely related to Turkish, the
Crimean Tatars are the descendants of the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan who settled here in the 13th
century. Their historical legacy is nearly invisible today, systematically destroyed first by the czars and
then the Soviets.
But the Tatars, improbably, have revived themselves and are once again political players in Crimea. They
are no longer the rulers, but as a politically active minority, they could act as the wild card in an eventual
conflict over Crimea.
The Tatars established a khanate that was allied with the Ottoman Empire and ruled Crimea for five
centuries. But they eventually got in the way of a rapidly expanding Russian empire, which, attracted by
the Black Sea ports, annexed Crimea in 1783. That year, the population of Crimea was 83 percent
Crimean Tatar, but Russian occupation occasioned a mass exodus by the Tatars, mainly to Turkey. Russia
assimilated the Crimean Tatar nobility and destroyed Tatar buildings.
By 1937, the Tatar population had declined to only 21 percent of Crimea's population. During World War
II, Stalin ordered the coup de grâce: Crimea was occupied by Germany, and he accused the Tatars of
collaborating with the Nazis. In a period of just three days, every Tatar man, woman, and child was
deported from Crimea—most loaded on train freight cars without food or water and shipped to Central
Asia. Tatars estimate that 46 percent of their population died within a year of the deportation. It was
barely a footnote in the history of World War II, but it became the defining event of the Crimean Tatar
nation.
(Incidentally, some Tatars did collaborate with the Nazis. But the deportations seemed motivated more by
Stalin's mistrust of ethnic minorities—there were similar expulsions of other Muslim groups like Chechens,
Ingush, and Balkars, who were behind Soviet lines such that there wasn't even an option to collaborate.
And, besides, some Ukrainians collaborated. Krushchev, in his 1956 "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party
Congress, said the Ukrainians would have been deported, too, except that "there were too many of them."
Today, Crimean Tatars take pains to emphasize their role in fighting on the Soviet side—for example, by
naming streets and squares after their war heroes.)
The Tatars were allowed to return in the late 1980s, and Ukrainian independence has given them political
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weight for the first time in centuries. About two-thirds of the Tatars—300,000 in total—have returned to
Crimea from Central Asia. But the deportation and return seems to have given them a drive that is lacking
in most post-Soviet peoples.

Communism created a welfare-dependent mentality among many of its subjects, who expected the state to
give them everything. Tatars, though, having been screwed repeatedly by the state, ended up far better
prepared for the end of communism. When they returned to Crimea, there was no land for them, so they
squatted and built houses themselves. While early iterations of those settlements were flimsy and muddy,
today they have been rebuilt into honest-to-goodness suburbs. In the early 1990s, racism kept Tatars from
getting state jobs, so they started small businesses, like Simferopol's now-ubiquitous private bus system.
Crimean Tatars have become politically active, too. In 1991, they formed an informal but influential
representative body, the Mejlis, and a handful of Crimean Tatar representatives serve in the local and
national parliaments.
From the beginning of their return from exile, the Tatars have taken the side of Ukraine in any
Moscow-Kiev rift. Tatars proudly point out the key role they played in keeping Crimea part of Ukraine in
the early years: During the 1991 referendum on independence, every part of Ukraine voted to break with
the Soviet Union. But in Crimea, the pro-independence vote was just barely 52 percent. Crimean Tatars,
who voted overwhelmingly for independence, provided the crucial margin of victory. In the two decades
since then, the Mejlis has given strong and vocal support to Kiev.
Centuries of bad experiences with Russia have convinced the Tatars that they are better off with Ukraine
than with Russia, said Refat Chubarov, the deputy leader of the Mejlis and one of two Crimean Tatars in
the Ukrainian parliament. "Ukrainians don't have any imperial ambition," he said. What's more, Ukrainians
and Tatars share a bond from being on the wrong side of Russian imperial ambition: "Many unfortunate
parts of our history come from Moscow, and it's the same with Ukraine," he said.
In an especially ghoulish coda to the deportation of the Tatars, Soviet tourists—a million a year—streamed
to Bakhchisaray to visit the Khan's Palace in a town that had been repopulated with Slavic residents. Part
of the reason it was such an attraction was Russians' passion for literature: Pushkin wrote a much-loved
poem—"The Bakhchisaray Fountain"—about the palace, and it's likely that the place only survived the
fate of most other Crimean Tatar monuments because of the poem. Tatars say that Stalin even wanted to
change the name of the town to Pushkin but decided he couldn't because everyone knew Bakhchisaray
from the poem's title.
It's unlikely that many of the tourists who visited were aware that the Tatars whose exotic history they
were discovering still existed in real life, albeit 2,000 miles to the east in Uzbekistan. "The tours were
really ideologically oriented—they barely mentioned the Crimean Tatars, and if they did, it was only
negative—that we didn't accomplish anything," said a Tatar museum official who showed me around but
who didn't want me to use his name. Tours of the palace emphasized the fact that Russian slaves built it.
They also emphasized tawdrier aspects of the palace, like the harem. "In the Russian mind, Crimean Tatars
are bandits—they say we steal land, even though it was them who stole our land," he said.
The number of tourists is down these days—the only other visitors when I was there were some teenagers
drinking beer in the palace gardens—but the population of Bakhchisaray has doubled since the Tatars
returned from exile, and they now make up half of the people living here. The city is hemmed in by
limestone cliffs, but returning Tatars built a sprawling settlement above the city. The current mayor is a
Crimean Tatar, and the settlement has paved roads, new shops, and Internet cafes. Near the palace, a
medieval madrassah—one of the oldest in Europe—is being restored with aid from the Turkish
government.
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But as Crimean Tatars get more settled, their support for Kiev is waning. While the leaders of the Mejlis
remain firmly in Kiev's camp, some younger Tatar leaders are beginning to question what, exactly, they've
gotten for supporting Ukraine. I met Nadir Bekirov, a Crimean Tatar activist at a Simferopol restaurant
ironically called "Nostalgia," a Soviet-themed place decorated with busts of Lenin and Stalin.
While Crimean Tatars have loyally supported Ukraine, Ukraine hasn't done much to support the Tatars, he
said. There was a gentleman's agreement between Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars in the early days of
independence: that Tatars would support Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for later attention. "They told
us, 'Wait, we are weak, our first task is to establish independence and establish ourselves in the
international arena, and then we will get to your problems and your rights.' "
But the Ukrainian state is established now, and Kiev is still dragging its feet on the issues most important to
Crimean Tatars, like land rights, language rights, and education. Especially worrying, he said, is the growth
in Ukrainian nationalism under the new post-Orange Revolution government. While Ukrainians used to
treat Crimean Tatars as partners—at least rhetorically—the language has recently become less inclusive.
Bekirov quoted a 2007 speech by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko: "Ukraine is one nation, one
people, one language, one religion." "What are we supposed to think after that?" Bekirov asked.
While most comparisons of Ukraine and Georgia focus on Russian interference in both countries, Bekirov
pointed out a crucial mistake that both Georgia and Ukraine have made: mistreating their minorities. One
of the first acts of the independent Georgian state in the early 1990s was to revoke the autonomous status
that Abkhazia and South Ossetia had enjoyed; Georgian nationalism helped drive Abkhazia and South
Ossetia into the arms of Russia. Ukraine is doing the same with the Crimean Tatars, he said.
Western countries, including the United States, share in the blame for Ukraine's neglect of the Tatars,
Bekirov said. While Western officials working on EU or NATO membership do pay attention to the way
Ukraine treats its minorities, they tend to get their information from Mejlis officials, who are too cozy with
Kiev and don't represent the will of most Crimean Tatars, he said. "[Mejlis officials] always say 'Yes, we
have problems, but the government is good and they will solve our problems.' But they haven't."
"Step by step, a big majority of Crimean Tatars are turning against the Mejlis and against Ukraine,"
Bekirov said. "But when I say we are turning against Ukraine, I don't mean we're going to rebel or support
any military activities. We're just going to become outsiders, observers. This is dangerous for Ukraine to
lose their allies, but we're not going to be the tools of the Ukrainian state anymore."
It's not clear how this will play out if the conflict between Ukraine and Russia heats up over Crimea, but
with Russians forming a majority in the region and many Ukrainians holding pro-Russia sympathies, Kiev
needs all the allies it can get here. The museum official told me he's not sure which side he's on anymore.
"I don't know what's better for us—Russia discriminates against us and wants to assimilate us. But on the
other hand, Kiev talks about our rights but doesn't take any action," he said. "So I don't know what's
worse—Russian chauvinism, which is very old, and Ukrainian chauvinism, which is new."
From: Joshua Kucera
Subject: Can a Russian Naval Base Remain in a Ukrainian City?
Posted Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009, at 6:45 AM ET
SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine—"See the ships of the Black Sea fleet," the tout shouted through the megaphone.
"Submarines!" So I paid $10 for the boat tour around the port of Sevastopol, the most storied city in
Russian naval history, which is still host to a Russian navy base 18 years after becoming part of an
independent Ukraine. Setting off, we puttered past several Russian military ships, curiosities like "Hitler's
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yacht" (apparently recently purchased by an Italian entrepreneur to be turned into a museum) and, yes, a
submarine. We came to the Moskva, a guided-missile cruiser that is the flagship of the Black Sea fleet and
saw action off the coast of Georgia in the summer of 2008. "This is the most beautiful ship in the Black
Sea fleet," the tour guide said. "It was renovated by funds from the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov." If
anyone else seemed to think it remarkable that the renovation of a battleship would be funded by a mayor,
especially the mayor of a foreign city 800 miles away, they didn't mention it.
But the connection between Russian politics and the Black Sea fleet is understood by everyone here. The
fleet's presence in Sevastopol has become the single most contentious issue in the Russian-Ukrainian
dispute over Crimea. Russian nationalist politicians have made Sevastopol's status a cause célèbre, and
Mayor Luzhkov has made frequent visits to Sevastopol, giving speeches that argue it is a "Russian city"
and claim that a loophole in the 1954 agreement transferring Crimea from Russia to Ukraine excepted
Sevastopol. He has funded housing for Russian sailors, Russian Orthodox churches, and the establishment
of a branch of Moscow State University in Sevastopol.

Finally, the Ukrainian government got fed up and declared Luzhkov persona non grata in 2008. Ukrainian
President Viktor Yushchenko said the fleet will have to leave when its current lease expires in 2017. And
when several ships in the Black Sea fleet were used in the South Ossetia war against Ukrainian ally
Georgia, Yushchenko tightened the rules on Russian use of the port. Now Russian ships have to give 72
hours' notice before they leave the port.
Sevastopol doesn't feel as much like a living city as it does a museum to the heroic past. Entering the city,
visitors are greeted with a World War II-era train-mounted artillery piece painted with the slogan "Death
to Fascism." The central part of the city is full of handsome white alabaster neoclassical buildings from the
czarist era—or so it appears. The city was almost completely destroyed in World War II, but Stalin spared
it the fate of most ruined cities—to be rebuilt in soulless concrete—and allowed it to be reconstructed to
its former glory. There are 2,000 monuments around the city, including a massive World War II memorial
with an eternal flame that is guarded by high-school students in military-style uniforms, as well as
monuments to the dead of the Afghanistan war and Crimean War (in which Sevastopol also played a
critical and heroic role, defending Russian territory from a combined European-Turkish force). The city's
Lenin statue has an uncharacteristically out-of-the-way location, while the most prominently placed statue
is of Adm. Pavel Nakhimov, a Crimean War hero.
The streets are filled with Russian navy officers in dress uniforms. (You occasionally see Ukrainian sailors,
too—their much smaller Black Sea fleet is also based here.) Even at a punk show I attended, several of the
young men in the audience wore blue-and-white striped Russian navy shirts under their leather jackets or
Sex Pistols T-shirts. And its residents are proud. The first two people I met in the city called it "the most
beautiful city in the former Soviet Union" and "the most beautiful city in the world."
From a military perspective, Sevastopol isn't quite what it used to be. While the Black Sea fleet once
numbered as many as 635 ships, it's now down to about 60 operational vessels on the Russian side and a
half-dozen on the Ukrainian side, the rest reduced to scrap. In the days of the Soviet Union, there were
100,000 service members and military support staff based in Sevastopol; that is down to 40,000 now. The
agreement between Russia and Ukraine regulating the fleet's operation stipulates that ships can only be
repaired or replaced with an equivalent ship, so as the fleet ages, it is gradually becoming obsolete. The
Black Sea itself is not a particularly hot spot, and passage out of the sea is tightly governed by Turkey,
which controls the straits into the Mediterranean. Russia is reportedly considering moving the fleet to
Novorossiysk, the largest Russian port on the Black Sea, or even to Mediterranean ports in Libya or Syria.
But if Sevastopol's real strategic importance is on the wane, its symbolic importance remains. I met Adm.
Vladimir Solovyev, the former intelligence chief of the Black Sea fleet, who is now head of the local office
of the Institute of Countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a Moscow-based think tank that
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promotes Russian influence in former Soviet republics. When I arrived, the front desk called to his office:
"Comrade Kucera and Comrade Gladenko [my translator] are here to see you." He greeted me wearing a
lapel pin featuring the flags of Russia and Abkhazia, the Russia-backed slice of Georgia that has broken
free and is recognized only by Russia and Nicaragua.
Solovyev said he still sees a future for the fleet in Sevastopol. The agreement that restricts new equipment
from coming in is open to interpretation, he said. "Russia doesn't take this seriously. Now it doesn't matter,
because we don't have any new ships, but when we get new ships, they will try to solve this." Besides, he
added, Novorossiysk isn't as good a port as Sevastopol, and Libya or Syria was unlikely. "Russia doesn't
base ships abroad," he said. "Our goal is not to conquer countries, but to free them."
The important thing in dealing with Sevastopol, he said, is not strategic military interests but "the human
factor." People in Sevastopol don't have a problem being part of Ukraine, as long as the Russian character
of the city is acknowledged. He said when there are joint military parades featuring both Russian and
Ukrainian forces, "everything is positive. But when the Ukrainian government tries to have events that
show only their side, no one shows up. When Russia organizes parades, the whole harbor is full of people."
"The people here want to be with Russia," he said. "I don't know what would happen if the fleet had to
leave in 2017. I think what happened in South Ossetia would look mild in comparison."
From: Joshua Kucera
Subject: Language Wars
Posted Friday, Feb. 27, 2009, at 6:55 AM ET
SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine—I went to Sevastopol to talk to people about the Black Sea fleet, but once I
arrived, I found that there was another topic that was much more controversial: language. The Ukrainian
government, as is typical with newly independent countries, is attempting to strengthen its citizens' sense
of national identity, and that includes promoting use of the Ukrainian language at the expense of Russian.
While Russian was heavily favored during the Soviet era, these days, TV and radio commercials must be in
Ukrainian, and the government just forced several of the biggest Russian TV channels off the air. More
and more schools teach in Ukrainian, and foreign movies have to be dubbed into Ukrainian.
In Crimea, where 97 percent of the population speaks Russian at home, the new rules are a bit looser.
School, for example, is still conducted mainly in Russian, and the Ukrainian government is using the carrot
as much as the stick—for example, it opened an elite new high school in Simferopol that boasts the only
two indoor swimming pools in the city. The language of instruction is Ukrainian. While signs for businesses
in the rest of Ukraine have to be in Ukrainian, in Crimea, local businesses can post signs in Russian; only
national or international companies must run their ads in Ukrainian.
Still, the creep of Ukrainianization into Crimea has alarmed Russians. I met Raisa Teliatnikova, head of the
local office of the Russian Community of Crimea, an organization funded by Moscow Mayor Yuri
Luzhkov that pushes for more rights for Russian-speaking Crimeans. "It can be a case of life or death—an
elderly woman gets drugs from the pharmacy and the instructions are in Ukrainian, and she could die,"
Teliatnikova claimed. "In court, every trial is in Ukrainian. In schools, everything is in Ukrainian." Here I
interrupted. I thought almost all schools in Crimea taught in Russian. "Next year, all education will be in
Ukrainian," she said. "And the history textbooks have perverted history, they talk about Russia like it was
Ukraine's enemy. It's complete nonsense."

Most of this is exaggeration, to put it generously. I found that trials are mainly conducted in Russian. And
while prescription drug information is usually in Ukrainian, the controversy—which several other people
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mentioned—is a bit ginned-up. After all, who really reads the detailed pharmacological information,
contraindications, and whatever else is in the small print? Most people just take the medicine as often as
the doctor says, so it seems unlikely that old Russian ladies are dying because they can't read Ukrainian.
This sort of exaggeration has clearly had an effect, though, leading people to believe that the problem is
worse than it is. Groups like the Russian Community are more active in Sevastopol than in Simferopol, and
I heard many more complaints about the language situation in the former than in the latter. For example, I
went to a movie theater and met a couple who were making a production of checking that the movie they
wanted to see hadn't been dubbed into Ukrainian. But they were asking about a Russian movie, and even I
knew that Russian movies were left alone. (Foreign movies are dubbed into Ukrainian and given Russian
subtitles.) My translator, a Russia-sympathizing, Putin-loving Ukrainian who has lived in Sevastopol her
entire life, was convinced that all local television was in Ukrainian. (She watches only Russian channels
via the Internet.) But when I checked the television in my hotel room, I found that, at least in the evening,
all local TV stations except one broadcast in Russian.
There are signs that tension is rising. Among Sevastopol's 2,000 monuments, the newest is to Catherine the
Great, the Russian empress who founded the city in 1783. Her statue—just across from the Black Sea
Fleet Museum—was vandalized with blue and yellow paint (the colors of the Ukrainian flag) shortly after
it was unveiled in summer 2008. The culprits were never caught, and as one city official told me, "both
sides could gain" from riling up nationalist sentiment. Today, the statue is "protected" by volunteer
Sevastopol residents and decorated with fresh flowers.
Whenever U.S. ships make port calls to Sevastopol, people turn out to protest. Teliatnikova showed me
pictures of one such protest in September: The first photo was of a woman giving a one-fingered salute to
the ship, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Dallas. The protests apparently made the American sailors aboard
change their plans to stroll around the city; instead, they took a bus tour. "They are military men, but they
were afraid," she laughed.
But another Russian Community member, Alexander Morosov, who came into Teliatnikova's office during
our interview, wanted to temper her anti-Western tone slightly. Russians fondly remember Americans'
contributions to the defense of the Soviet Union in World War II, he said. He told me about Lyudmila
Pavlichenko, a famed Soviet "girl sniper" credited with 309 kills during World War II, who took part in the
defense of Sevastopol and was later received by President Roosevelt at the White House. "We treat
Americans with great respect," he said. "But when you come as NATO representatives, that's what we
reject."
I had a little more sympathy for Russian complaints of Ukrainianization when I met Alexandr
Skripnichenko, the director of Sevastopol Television, who had a Ukrainian flag and photo of Ukrainian
President Viktor Yushchenko behind his desk.
While half the station's programming is in Russian and half is Ukrainian, starting in April 2009, the ratio
will switch to 25 percent Russian, 75 percent Ukrainian. I said that seemed like a lot for Sevastopol, since
97 percent of people spoke Russian in their homes.
"This is a natural process. This is Ukraine, the state language is Ukrainian, and it's getting stronger and
stronger," he said. "Two years ago, there used to be protests about this, but the situation has gotten better.
Many people have come to the conclusion that they need to speak the state language, and young people
especially speak Ukrainian perfectly well. The real problem is that there are a lot of people who want to
learn Ukrainian here, but the schools don't provide them the opportunity."
He said the blame lies with Soviet military veterans, who agitate for Russian-language rights. "They retired
when they were young, and they still have a lot of energy. They are accustomed to having a high social
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status, their wives are highly educated, and they're used to getting things their way. That's why it's hard for
them to accept speaking Ukrainian," he said. "Young people are more flexible with regard to language, and
it's easier for them to adapt."
As we left the interview, my translator—a 24-year-old who spoke Russian and had no desire to learn
Ukrainian—looked at me with an "I told you so" expression. It was hard to argue with her. For the
Ukrainian government to be so tone-deaf and cavalier about the wishes of its ethnic Russian citizens
seemed to bode ill for them to ever become fully invested citizens of Ukraine.
Russians can be exasperating. I thought back to my interview with Sergei Kiselev, the professor in
Simferopol. He had mentioned the same quote from Yushchenko as had Nadir Bekirov, the Crimean Tatar
activist: "Ukraine is one nation, one people, one language, one religion." Kiselev's response was hysterical:
"This is a Nazi Ukraine. Today the state policy is fascist. Hitler said 'one people, one church, one state.' So
what is the difference?" Kiselev is obviously overstating his case. But he had a point. What Ukrainians see
as a long-awaited national awakening is seen by Crimeans, both Russians and Tatars, as chauvinism. And
what looks in Kiev like a legitimate push-back against Moscow's meddling in Crimea looks much more
sinister to the individual Russians who have lived here for generations. The pre-Orange Revolution
governments in Kiev, for all their many faults, managed to keep a lid on the tense situation in Crimea. It
remains to be seen whether Yushchenko will do the same.

Joshua Kucera is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2211811/

Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

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