Crimea secedes from Ukraine

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Crimea’s overwhelming vote to secede from Ukraine and its annexation by Russia were followed by mass demonstrations and occupations of government buildings in southern and eastern Ukraine, where protesters have raised similar demands for affiliation with Russia.

An April 7 Associated Press article provided a mea­ sure of the stakes involved: “The Donetsk and Kharkiv regions—and a third Russian-speaking city besieged by pro-Moscow activists over the weekend, Lu­ hansk—have a combined population of nearly 10 mil­ lion out of Ukraine’s 46 million, and account for the bulk of the country’s industrial output.”

Ukraine’s acting President Oleksandr Turhynov, who was installed after the far-right coup of Feb. 20 had toppled the former regime in Kiev, said that he in­ tended to treat the demonstrators as “terrorists.” Po­ lice arrested dozens in a nighttime sweep. Meanwhile, Washington and NATO have escalated their Cold War rhetoric against Russia, which they accuse of foment­ ing the demonstrations in Ukraine’s east and massing troops on the border in preparation for an invasion.

After the secession of Crimea, the Obama adminis­ tration initiated limited economic sanctions against Russia, while raising the threat of stronger measures. But the best that Obama administration officials could muster to explain the 97 percent vote of the Crimean people on March 16 in favor of seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia was that there were “massive vot­ ing anomalies.” No one disputed that 83 percent of the electorate participated in the referendum.

The New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner and onthe-scene reporter C.J. Chivers took on the task of discrediting the vote by reporting on the implied in­ timidating presence of Russian troops. It soon became clear, however, that few others in the world doubted that the vote totals reflected anything other than the reality—the large majority Russian-speaking popula­ tion of Crimea was fearful of the consequences of the right-wing, virulently chauvinist, and anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, led in significant part by armed proNazis militias.

Even Chivers felt compelled to note the massive Rus­ sian flag-waving rallies throughout Crimea that hailed the results.

The Associated Press reported that two-thirds of Ukraine’s 18,800 soldiers chose to remain in Crimea—most of them joining the Russian army. The 6400 or so (according to one source) who elected to return home were assigned by Russian troops to their barracks to pack their bags to leave.

Every day, the corporate Orwellian-like NewsSpeak media conjured up the threatening spectacle of Rus­ sian troops and/or local Crimean defense forces sur­ rounding Ukrainian military bases and preparing for bloody attacks. Instead, what appears to have hap­ pened is a series of political exchanges that quickly ended in Ukrainian soldiers’ agreeing to evacuate all military bases and turn them over to Russian or allied local militias. A single person was reported killed and 6 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2014 and eastern Ukraine have (Left) Crimeans celebrate after vote to leave Ukraine & join Russia.

of an escalation of unrest in Crimea, the U.S. Army is ready to back up Ukraine and its allies in Europe with military ac­ tions.”

Prior to his “resignation,” the German news magazine Der Spiegel asked Te­ nyukh if he was “concerned about being disappointed by the European Union,” with regard to the harsh bailout terms of the Association Agreement.

Tenyukh’s reply? “Our dream of Eu­ rope is not dependent on prosperity [an issue that we will return to at the conclusion of this article]. We want Eu­ ropean values; we want an independent judiciary and freedom.” [!] In contrast, during a Jan. 19 Maidan (Independence Square) rally in Kiev, the “democratically minded” Tenyukh warned of the dangers posed by what he termed “the coup d’etat planned by the current [Victor Yanukovych] au­ thorities.” The now quickly deposed/ resigned defense minister, perhaps too “moderate” today for the new regime, at that time called for members of the armed forces to defy “illegal” orders from those in power—that is, the elect­ ed government of Yanukovych.

Tenyukh stated, “Tomorrow the [Yanukovych] re­ gime will enslave you too. Therefore we are calling on you to fulfill your military oath of loyalty to the Ukrainian people, and not to the [elected] authorities who have gone off the rails.” Tenyukh’s Feb. 29 ap­ pointment as minister of defense lasted just short of one-month. He resigned on March 25, a day after fas­ cist militia leader Oleksandra Muzychko was killed by Ukrainian Interior forces. Apparently, the new regime is sensitive about its police or military forces killing one of its own!

In the meantime, at the instigation of the United States, the G7 group of the largest industrialized na­ tions condemned both the Crimean vote to secede and Russia’s subsequent decision to incorporate Crimea. The G7 called Russia’s actions a “clear viola­ tion of international law,” and booted out Russia from what previously had been the G8. The G8 meeting, scheduled to take place in Sochi, was cancelled. Per­ haps revealing more than a bit of truth, the Russians responded that “the G8 is an informal club” that “can’t purge anyone by definition.” Indeed, a “club” it is—a place where the richest and most powerful imperial nations gather to negotiate deals that best meet the interests of their ruling classes.

That G7 nations’ interests were in conflict was re­ flected in the financial sanctions imposed by the U.S. and European Union (EU) on a select and relatively unimportant group of Russian and pro-Russian Ukrai­ nian elites. In essence, these lesser officials saw their U.S. and European bank accounts and other assets fro­ zen. The EU, qualitatively more dependent on imports from and exports to Russia, especially the importation of Russian gas and other fossil fuels, took care to not sanction Russian’s big-time capitalists, whom they depend on, at least for now, for vital fuel resources. The U.S., selecting a different group of industrialists and minor power brokers to punish, was similarly modest in its choices.

Few, if any, observers have commented on the defini­ tion of the word sanctions. In essence, in the present context, it means freezing the assets of one’s enemies or competitors—an act close to stealing those assets. In the case of Libya, for example, when the U.S. froze the U.S. banking assets of the top Gadhafi regime lead­ ers, it failed to release them after the U.S./NATO war that virtually destroyed that nation. In fact, the U.S. announced in effect that it would not return these as­ sets at all and instead would use them to pay for the military expenses it had incurred in destroying the country—a neat imperialist bit of multi-billion-dollar rhetoric to be sure!

Despite their heated Cold War rhetoric, both the EU and the U.S. calculated that harsh sanctions, that is, stealing too much money from the Russian oligarchs or their Ukrainian counterparts, might bring on simi­ lar retaliatory measures that could interrupt the world’s interdependent capitalist order. While Russia is a relatively minor player today, over-dependent on (continued on page 7, in “Protesters in southern”)