Putin has not returned Crimea to its rightful place

According to international law, Crimea is Ukrainian, which even Russia once recognized, and if it insists on returning the territories to their former owners, it should return Kaliningrad (Königsberg) to the Germans, Karelia to the Finns, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands to the Japanese, and Vladivostok (Haishenwei) to the Chinese, and also grant independence to the Chechens, Yakuts, Buryats, and a number of other peoples that Russia enslaved

 

We analyze a post on the social network Facebook which says:

Meanwhile, Trump posted a photo comparing himself to Nixon and Putin to Khrushchev.

But there is one big nuance: Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine, and Putin returned it to where it belongs.

It is untrue that Vladimir Putin returned Crimea to its rightful place. But, ironically, this pro-Russian statement unwittingly acknowledges that Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was Putin’s decision, not the decision of the local population expressed in a referendum–as Russian propagandists claim. Putin, according to the statement, returned Crimea to Russia, not the people of the peninsula.

Crimea is not an original Russian territory, but Russia seized and annexed it in 1783, so what Putin did in 2014 is a reoccupation, not a just return or liberation.

The Russian Empire was one of the largest in history and it ruled over: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Finland, the Baltics, the Caucasus, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, part of Poland, and even Alaska. Thus, at one point, Crimea also fell under the empire.

Until then, the peninsula had been ruled by the Khanate (empire) of the Crimean Tatars, previously by the Ancient Greeks, Byzantium, the Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Khazars, the Goths, the Venetians, the Genoese, and other cultures, and only briefly and partially by the Slavs.

Russia conquered the Crimean Tatars in 1783, oppressing them and reducing them to a minority, as evidenced by censuses held over the years. Thousands of Crimean Tatars were persecuted by the Russians in the Ottoman Empire, with which they had close ties, and are found in Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania.

The culmination was the deportation carried out by Soviet Russia in May 1944, when Crimean Tatars were deported en masse in stock cars to remote parts of the USSR such as Uzbekistan.

Thus, Russia turned Crimea into “Russian,” and it did so by settling Russians, changing toponyms, etc. The current capital of Crimea — Simferopol — was previously called Ak Mesjid (“White Mosque”); Sevastopol — Akyar (“White Beach”); Yevpatoriya — Gezlev; Feodosia — Kaffa; etc.

The Crimean Tatars and the ancestors of today’s Ukrainians, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, sometimes fought among themselves, sometimes cooperated, but when they faced a common enemy–the Russian conqueror, that cooperation strengthened and continues to this day.

After the collapse of the Russian Empire, the independent and short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic (1918-1921) was created, as well as the Crimean People’s Republic (1917-1918) led by the Crimean Tatar activist Noman Chelebidzhikhan (1885-1918), so there were ideas for their merger, either within Ukraine or as a federation.

But Soviet Russia carried out aggression against those countries, and in April 1918, Ukrainian troops under Petro Bolbochan (1883-1919), in cooperation with the Crimean Tatars, expelled the Russian Bolsheviks from Crimea. The post creates the impression that Crimea had no connection with Ukraine and that it had no support there, but, evidently, this is not entirely true.

However, Soviet Russia eventually won and installed puppet regimes in the occupied territories (Ukraine, Crimea, etc.), all of which became part of the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1922.

Crimea then fell under Soviet Russia, which lasted until 1954, when the USSR transferred the peninsula to Soviet Ukraine, explaining the move by citing geographical, economic, infrastructural and other connections. The statement is correct that the head of the USSR at the time was Nikita Khrushchev, but it does not have the right to shift all responsibility for the transfer to him.

His predecessor Joseph Stalin died in 1953, and Khrushchev was unable to consolidate his power to the point where he could do whatever he wanted in just one year. Khrushchev was not as powerful and cruel a dictator as Stalin and was more liberal, and he initially shared power with Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov and officials such as Nikolai Bulganin, Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Lazar Kaganovich. The USSR was at that time governed by a rather collective system.

From there we understand that Khrushchev did not decide everything on his own, and with that disinformation some are spreading the idea that “he was Ukrainian,” but he was an ethnic Russian from the Kursk Oblast of Russia.

In 2014, the Russian aggression and annexation of Crimea followed, which was presented as the righting of a historical injustice and its liberation, but we explained that this was not the case.

If anyone there suffered injustices, it was the Crimean Tatars. They have no other homeland than Crimea, so they must ask about its fate, and they stand with Ukraine. Such is the position of their activists like Refat Chubarov and their mejlis, which is something like an assembly for them.

They boycotted the fake referendum on the separation of Crimea from Ukraine, organized by the Russian occupier and his local helpers, and the UN rejected it with an appropriate resolution.

Here we are presented with international law. Previously, it was not as developed, so conquests were a normal occurrence, but humanity eventually agreed to overcome this with a clearly established legal order and inviolability of borders, with the exception of only extreme situations such as genocide or the like when secession is allowed. But there was no genocide against the Russians in Crimea.

And if Russia insists on returning territories to their former owners, it should return Kaliningrad (Königsberg) to the Germans, Karelia to the Finns, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands to the Japanese, and Vladivostok (Haishenwei) to the Chinese, and also grant independence to the Chechens, Yakuts, Buryats, and a number of other peoples that Russia has enslaved.

But civilized countries do not insist on such radical steps, because the revision of borders brings instability and conflict. Anyone in the world can claim that they are territorially unjustified and offer arguments for it (sustainable or unsustainable), so the conflicts will have no end, and that must not be the case.

Russia, as the so-called continuer of the USSR, is one of the founders of the UN, so it must respect international law. Crimea is Ukraine and as such is recognized by the whole world, which Russia itself once recognized.

As for the part of the post related to Donald Trump, he posted a photo in which he seemed to be threatening Putin with a pointed finger, and along with it he posted another, from an argument in 1959 between the then US Vice President Richard Nixon and the aforementioned Khrushchev, in which Nixon also points a threatening finger at his interlocutor.

By doing so, Trump may be sending a message that he is not as lenient toward the Russians as is commonly believed, and that he is boldly opposing them, as Nixon did in the past—effectively comparing himself to Nixon. That introductory part of the post is probably correct, but the rest of it remains untrue.

Taking all of this into account, the general assessment is that the post is partially untrue.

 

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