I am wondering.... If Russia will make Crimea join as an independent country, will it annex Abkhazia, Osetia and Transinistria in the same way? Why not?
There were such proposals, in South Ossetia especially. The first President of South Ossetia described himself as a "Eurasianist" and sought a grand Eurasian Federation that South Ossetia could join. The trouble is though that the Russians can't actually annex a territory in the modern era if the international community still considers that territory to belong to, for instance, Moldova or Georgia or in this case Ukraine. Chechnya, a country that was annexed, declared its independence from Russia so that was an internal matter. The matters around the Dniester and the southern Caucasus are much too external.
Interestingly the South Ossetians backtracked quite substantially a few years ago and started making clear that they, under no circumstances, will give up their independence because they voted for it in a democratic referendum. I don't know what that means in the big scheme of things, whether it's just the Kremlin trying to justify the lack of inclusion of South Ossetia into Russia and thus unification with their fellow Ossetes in the North. If they are genuinely that pro-independence maybe the truth is that the Ossetes want an independent Alania more than anything else.
I would support that, the Ossetes have as much a right to that territory as the Kosovar Albanians do to Kosovo. The trouble was their ethnic cleansing of the native Georgian families in the South Ossetian war and all that, but such is life the world over.
You may consider me somewhat hypocritical if I would be more open minded about South Ossetian union with North Ossetia-Alania to create an independent state, given that I am vehemently opposed to what the Crimean government is doing, but I've said before that the Crimean government is not separatist. They are
irredentist and there's another ethnic group in that area that, in my opinion, should have their own independent state.
I say Crimea should be independent. They should be a very neutral state like Bosnia-Herzegovina where, on paper, all three ethnic groups are equal. The state should be trilingual with special multi-ethnic representation in government. Crimean Tatars should be allowed to return home easily and, if the full Crimean Tatar population return home from Central Asia and elsewhere, they will at first rival the Russian population and even if less than a quarter of the 6 million who claim to be of strong Crimean Tatar descent in Turkey (enough that it matters to them) move back as well then they will vastly outnumber the Russians, giving the Tatars their country back.
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Topic: UR's Post-USSR politics megathread (Read 309282 times)