Russia Violates Its Treaty Recognizing Crimea as Ukrainian

In my last post, I mentioned a 1997 agreement in which the United States pledged to protect Ukraine.  That treaty, which was reached in order to eliminate Soviet nuclear weapons from Ukrainian territory, also included Russia.  In it, the Russian Federation agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.  The Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea violates the agreement, in addition to broader international law.

Russian troops invading Crimea and seizing Ukrainian government facilities there, as well as those Russian troops who have made incursions into other Ukrainian territory wore no identifying insignia on their uniforms, which suggests that Russia has had to hide what it has been doing because it knew it was violating international law.

One excuse that Russians and their sympathizers are using to justify Russia’s conquest of Crimea, despite the 1997 agreement, is that the Black Sea peninsula had previously been Russian, until it was transferred by the Soviets to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  However, by this reasoning, because Crimea had been part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire previously, it should be part of Turkey.  Indeed, just as there are Russian colonists in Crimea, the presence of which was used as a justification for uniting the territory with Russia, there are longtime Turkic Muslim inhabitants, too, namely the Tatars. 

In fact, the Russian Federation is the rump of the Soviet Empire, of which it is the successor, but it nonetheless is also the rump of the Russian Empire.  The Russian Federation is thus a polyglot empire.  While ostensibly supporting Crimean self-determination, it opposes independence from Russia for Chechnya, but the Russian Federation’s borders, territorial integrity and sovereignty, like Ukraine’s, are internationally recognized, just as Russia itself recognized Ukraine’s borders to include Crimea.  The question of sovereignty over Crimea was no oversight, but a major concern at the time because of Russia’s desire to maintain its Black Sea Fleet, which is based in Crimea. Ukraine agreed to lease the base to Russia, which was permitted no more than 25,000 troops in the autonomous territory.  

Russia and its sympathizers are also being inconsistent in their attempt to make the West seem inconsistent by comparing the referendum for independence for Kosovo to that of Crimea, as a legal justification for the latter referendum.  I shall refute this argument in my next post.