Violence continues in the Ukraine today, as some 20,000 ethnic Tatar protesters took to the streets of Sevastopol, attacking a much smaller rally of pro-Russian secessionist Crimeans.
The two sides engaged in fist-fights and threw bottles at one another, with one person reportedly dying of a heart attack during the melee, and 20 others suffering various injuries.
The Tatars are a Turkic ethnicity which were the dominate people in Crimea during the Crimean Khanate, which was annexed into Russia in the late 18th century. Today, ethnic Russians are the majority of the people in the Crimea.
The Tatars are backing the interim government in Kiev, and the leaders of the rally vowed to “eliminate” the growing secessionist sentiment among Crimean Russians.
The strategy of attacking secessionists does not appear to be working, as many of the pro-secession protesters say the violence underscores the need to split from the rest of the Ukraine and secure closer ties to Russia.
The Russian naval base at Sevastopol is at stake. If any new government of Ukraine is so stupid as to associate itself with NATO the Russians will occupy all of the Crimea.
The other side of the equation is that the EU and NATO would be immensely stupid to make Ukraine a member without the Crimean issue settled.
The EU and NATO would be simply stupid accepting Ukraine as a member even with the fate of Sevastopol settled.
I do not know whether Ms. Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt discussed the Crimea in their now-famous (infamous?) phone call. Nevertheless, the Crimea has predictably (1) become a major problem for the White House. As the Obama administration publicly (I do not know what it did non-publicly) supported the "desires" of the Kievian Ukrainians it will show its true nature if it does not now support the wishes of the majority of the Crimean population by warning the new government in Kiev and the Tatar protesters that sanctions (no financial bailout) may be placed on them if they violently or otherwise repress/deny these wishes.
The Wilsonian principle demands that the people of the Crimea be given the right of a plebiscite to determine whether they want to stay with Ukraine, return to Russia, or become an independent state. That would be the only non-violent resolution of that aspect of the Ukrainian crisis.
(1) As has been and still is the case in many places of the world, the assignment of the Crimea to Ukraine was done in Stalinist times purely on geographic rationale.
One minute ago I have finished reading the article of Christian Neef on the Ukrainian oligarchs. It is an eye-opener.
The Turks will lay some sort of claim to Crimea, watch, if they haven't already.
They never got over their Ottoman roots, and once upon a time the Black Sea was the Sultan's lake.