An international conference held in Yalta highlights how Crimea has been subjected to harsh sanctions by the West since it conducted a constitutionally valid referendum to secede from Ukraine in 2014.
IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN THREE YEARS SINCE the people inhabiting the Crimean peninsula overwhelmingly voted to rejoin Russia. In the referendum held in March 2014, as many as 96.77 per cent of the votes were cast in favour of the proposal to leave the Republic of Ukraine. The turnout of voters was 83.1. The people of Crimea took the decision to hold a fair and free referendum after the “coup d’etat” in Ukraine. The democratically elected President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, was forcibly ousted from the capital, Kiev, through violent street protests orchestrated by right-wing groups, financed and supported by the West. He was removed unconstitutionally from office shortly after he fled the Ukrainian capital. He then sought refuge briefly in a more hospitable part of the country before finally seeking asylum in Russia. Intercepts of high-level meddling from American officials were released, including those of calls by hawkish interventionists in the Obama administration such as Samantha Powers, calling for regime change in Ukraine.
Yanukovych’s major crime in the eyes of the West was that he turned down at the eleventh hour the European Union’s (E.U) offer for closer integration in favour of strengthening ties with Ukraine’s immediate neighbour and traditional ally, Russia. The illegal removal of a democratically elected President was camouflaged by a sham parliamentary vote of no-confidence in February 2014. The autonomous government of Crimea responded by declaring that it no longer recognised the Ukrainian central government’s sovereignty over its territory. Crimea, it should be remembered, was not part of Ukraine until 1954. Nikita Khrushchev, Premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) at the time, transferred the peninsula to Ukraine for purely administrative reasons.
This story is from the December 8, 2017 edition of FRONTLINE.
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This story is from the December 8, 2017 edition of FRONTLINE.
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