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Report: Hillary Clinton compares Russia to Nazi Germany
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| love | Дата: Среда, 05.03.2014, 07:35 | Сообщение # 1 |
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Hillary Clinton, in some of her first comments on the evolving crisis in Ukraine , compared Russia’s move to issue passports in Crimea to “population transfers” in pre-World War II Germany, according to a report late Tuesday.
The remarks at an event in Southern California by Clinton, who generally has shied away from public discussion of foreign policy issues since she left the State Department in early 2013, were first reported by BuzzFeed.
Clinton referenced the passports that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been issuing to people with Russian ties in Crimea, according to reports.
“Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ‘30s,” Clinton said, according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, which had a reporter covering the otherwise closed-press event. “All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people, and that’s what’s gotten
“Mrs. Clinton talked at length on the situation in the Ukraine,” Harry Saltzgaver, executive editor of Long Beach newspaper group, told Buzzfeed earlier.
Both Saltzgaver and a second fundraiser attendee, who requested anonymity, described Clinton’s parallel between the actions of Putin and Adolf Hitler, who resettled tens of thousands of ethnic Germans in Eastern and Central Europe to Nazi Germany.
“She compared issuing Russian passports to Ukrainians with ties to Russia with early actions by Nazi Germany before Hitler began invading neighboring countries,” Saltzgaver added. “She said, however, that while that makes people nervous, there is no indication that Putin is as irrational as the instigator of World War II.”
“She talked about how what Putin is doing now is similar to what Hitler did, essentially providing these ethnic Russians in the Crimea region access back to Russia,” a second attendee told BuzzFeed. “And that it was destabilizing.”
The event was a $1,500-a-head fundraiser for the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach. It was not open to the media at large.
Clinton talked about her experience with that region “both regarding Putin’s attitude of wanting to put Mother Russia back together, and the pressure put on the Ukrainian president not to sign agreements with the European Union,” Saltzgaver told the website.
Clinton spokesmen did not respond to two emails requesting comment.
The situation in Ukraine is still developing, and Clinton, according to the report, offered no comment on the path forward.
Clinton’s relationship with Putin has been tumultuous. In 2009, she presented Russia’s foreign minister with a “reset” button that was meant to signify the rebooting of the relationship between Russia and the United States but was inscribed with the wrong word. She was deeply critical of Putin, however, during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Putin accused Clinton of egging on opposition protests in 2011, amid increasing tensions surrounding the uprisings in the Mideast.
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| love | Дата: Среда, 05.03.2014, 07:38 | Сообщение # 2 |
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| Why Russia No Longer Fears the West
The West is blinking in disbelief – Vladimir Putin just invaded Ukraine. German diplomats, French Eurocrats and American pundits are all stunned. Why has Russia chosen to gamble its trillion-dollar ties with the West?
Western leaders are stunned because they haven’t realized Russia’s owners no longer respect Europeans the way they once did after the Cold War. Russia thinks the West is no longer a crusading alliance. Russia thinks the West is now all about the money.
Putin’s henchmen know this personally. Russia’s rulers have been buying up Europe for years. They have mansions and luxury flats from London’s West End to France’s Cote d’Azure. Their children are safe at British boarding and Swiss finishing schools. And their money is squirrelled away in Austrian banks and British tax havens.
Putin’s inner circle no longer fear the European establishment. They once imagined them all in MI6. Now they know better. They have seen firsthand how obsequious Western aristocrats and corporate tycoons suddenly turn when their billions come into play. They now view them as hypocrites—the same European elites who help them hide their fortunes.
Once Russia’s powerful listened when European embassies issued statements denouncing the baroque corruption of Russian state companies. But no more. Because they know full well it is European bankers, businessmen and lawyers who do the dirty work for them placing the proceeds of corruption in hideouts from the Dutch Antilles to the British Virgin Islands.
We are not talking big money. But very big money. None other than Putin’s Central Bank has estimated that two thirds of the $56 billion exiting Russia in 2012 might be traceable to illegal activities. Crimes like kickbacks, drug money or tax fraud. This is the money that posh English bankers are rolling out the red carpet for in London.
Behind European corruption, Russia sees American weakness. The Kremlin does not believe European countries – with the exception of Germany – are truly independent of the United States. They see them as client states that Washington could force now, as it once did in the Cold War, not to do such business with the Kremlin.
Back in Moscow, Russia hears American weakness out of Embassy Moscow. Once upon a time the Kremlin feared a foreign adventure might trigger Cold War economic sanctions where it hurts: export bans on key parts for its oil industry, even being cut out of its access to the Western banking sector. No more.
Russia sees an America distracted: Putin’s Ukrainian gambit was a shock to the U.S. foreign policy establishment. They prefer talking about China, or participating in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Russia sees an America vulnerable: in Afghanistan, in Syria and on Iran—a United States that desperately needs Russian support to continue shipping its supplies, host any peace conference or enforce its sanctions.
Moscow is not nervous. Russia’s elites have exposed themselves in a gigantic manner – everything they hold dear is now locked up in European properties and bank accounts. Theoretically, this makes them vulnerable. The EU could, with a sudden rush of money-laundering investigations and visa bans, cut them off from their wealth. But, time and time again, they have watched European governments balk at passing anything remotely similar to the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which bars a handful of criminal-officials from entering the United States.
All this has made Putin confident, very confident – confident that European elites are more concerned about making money than standing up to him. The evidence is there. After Russia’s strike force reached the outskirts of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, in 2008, there were statements and bluster, but not a squeak about Russia’s billions. After Russia’s opposition were thrown into show trials, there were concerned letters from the European Union, but again silence about Russia’s billions.
The Kremlin thinks it knows Europe’s dirty secret now. The Kremlin thinks it has the European establishment down to a tee. The grim men who run Putin’s Russia see them like latter-day Soviet politicians. Back in the 1980s, the USSR talked about international Marxism but no longer believed it. Brussels today, Russia believes, talks about human rights but no longer believes in it. Europe is really run by an elite with the morality of the hedge fund: Make money at all costs and move it offshore.
Ben Judah is author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In And Out Of Love With Vladimir Putin.
The Kremlin sees its evidence in the former leaders of Britain, France and Germany. Tony Blair now advises the dictatorship in Kazakhstan on how to improve its image in the West. Nicholas Sarkozy was contemplating setting up a hedge fund with money from absolutist Qatar. And Gerhard Schroder is the chairman of the Nord Stream consortium – a majority Gazprom-owned pipeline that connects Russia directly to Germany through the Baltic Sea.
Russia is confident there will be no Western economic counterattack. They believe the Europeans will not sanction the Russian oligarch money. They believe Americans will not punish the Russian oligarchs by blocking their access to banks. Russia is certain a military counterattack is out of the question. They expect America to only posture. Cancel the G-8? Who cares?
Because Putin has no fear of the West, he can concentrate on what matters back in Russia: holding onto power. When Putin announced he would return to the presidency in late 2011, the main growling question was: why?
The regime had no story to sell. What did Putin want to achieve by never stepping down? Enriching himself? The puppet president he shunted aside, Dmitry Medvedev, had at least sold a story of modernization. What, other than hunger for power, had made Putin return to the presidency? The Kremlin spin-doctors had nothing to spin.
Moscow was rocked by mass protests in December 2011. More than 100,000 gathered within sight of the Kremlin demanding Russia be ruled in a different way. The protesters were scared off the streets, but the problem the regime had in justifying itself remained. Putin had sold himself to the Russian people as the man who would stabilize the state and deliver rising incomes after the chaos of the 1990s. But with Russians no longer fearing chaos, but rather stagnation as the economy slowed – it was unclear what this “stability” was for.
This is where the grand propaganda campaign called the Eurasian Union has come into its own. This is the name of the vague new entity that Putin wants to create out of former Soviet states — the first steps toward which Putin has taken by building a Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, and he had hoped with a Ukraine run by Viktor Yanuvokych. This is not just about empire; it is about using empire to cover up the grotesque scale of Russian corruption and justify the regime.
Russia would rather have swallowed Ukraine whole, but the show must go on. Russian TV needs glories for Putin every night on the evening news. Russian politics is about spin, not substance. The real substance of Russian politics is the extraction of billions of dollars from the nation and shuttling them into tropical Western tax havens, which is why Russian politics needs perpetual PR and perpetual Putinist drama to keep all this hidden from the Russian people. Outraged Putin has built up a Kremlin fleet of luxury aircraft worth $1 billion? Angry that a third of the $51 billion budget of the Sochi games vanished into kickbacks? Forget about it. Russia is on the march again.
This is why Crimea is perfect Putin. Crimea is no South Ossetia. This is not some remote, mountainous Georgian village inhabited by some dubious ethnicity that Russians have never heard of. Crimea is the heart of Russian romanticism. The peninsula is the only part of the classical world that Russia ever conquered. And this is why the Tsarist aristocracy fell in love with it. Crimea symbolized Russia’s 18th and 19th-century fantasy to conquer Constantinople and liberate Greek Orthodox Christians from Muslim rule. Crimea became the imperial playground: In poetry and palaces, it was extolled as the jewel in the Russian crown.
Crimea is the only lost land that Russians really mourn. The reason is tourism. The Soviet Union built on the Tsarist myth and turned the peninsula into a giant holiday camp full of workers sanitariums and pioneer camps. Unlike, the Russian cities of say northern Kazakhstan, Crimea is a place Russians have actually been. Even today over one million Russians holiday in Crimea every year. It is not just a peninsula; this is Russia’s Club Med and imperial romanticism rolled into one.
Vladimir Putin knows this. He knows that millions of Russians will cheer him as a hero if he returns them Crimea. He knows that European bureaucrats will issue shrill statements and then get back to business helping Russian elites buy London town houses and French chateaux. He knows full well that the United States can no longer force Europe to trade in a different way. He knows full well that the United States can do nothing beyond theatrical military maneuvers at most.
This is why Vladimir Putin just invaded Crimea.
He thinks he has nothing to lose.
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| love | Дата: Среда, 05.03.2014, 07:40 | Сообщение # 3 |
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Ukraine, Putin TV and the Big Lie
You won't believe what the Russian media is saying about America right now.
Professor Sergey Markov is that rarest of species—an English-speaking pro-Kremlin pundit. That makes him just about the only Putin backer who regularly pops up on global TV screens to explain the rationale behind seemingly irrational Russian policies. He understands the international audience and does his best to retain an air of respectability. But all of that changes when he switches to Russian.
This is how Markov justifies the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in an interview with one of Russia’s most popular tabloids, Komsomolskaya Pravda: “Had Russia failed to interfere, Crimea would have come under pressure from police forces controlled by radicals and from neo-Nazi militants. Within a month, they would have established their government in Crimea and within one or two years they would have driven out almost all Russians.”
The best propaganda always has a tiny grain of truth. The vast majority of people in Crimea are ethnic Russians or Russophone Ukrainians who felt uneasy about the victory of pro-European protests in Kiev, which indeed had a very visible Ukrainian nationalist component. At the start of the protest, Independence Square in Kiev was awash with the red and black banners of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army—an anti-Soviet World War II guerrilla movement, which Russian propaganda dismisses as Nazi collaborators in a blatant oversimplification of history. Ultra-nationalists from the Right Sector coalition played a key role in the physical defense of the protests against riot police.
But all that is a far cry from Nazis taking over Kiev, an image now being stamped into the brains of Russian and East Ukrainian audiences 24 hours a day on Kremlin mouthpieces from television to newspapers, websites to official statements. Never mind that Kiev’s pro-democracy movement was overwhelmingly liberal, tolerant and, toward the end of it, increasingly Russian-speaking: to Putin’s propaganda machine, it’s all an American and European plot to destabilize Russia and turn the Russian people into slaves of the West. If Americans puzzling over what to make of Ukraine’s revolution and the crisis in Crimea could only hear what’s being said about them, they’d be shocked.
Just a sentence later in the interview, Markov concedes that the specter of a Nazi takeover is overblown. “Of course it wouldn’t take the same radical forms as in Nazi Germany. But they have a plan to turn Ukraine into Latvia or Estonia: Russians becoming second-tier citizens, Russian language banned.”
Again, a kernel of truth: After they became independent in 1991, Latvia and Estonia denied citizenship to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians who had moved into the two Baltic countries in the Soviet years. They were issued special “non-citizen” passports, which allowed them to stay, work and own businesses, but denied voting rights. It was unjust, but it didn’t lead to people fleeing to Russia in any significant numbers. On the contrary, Baltic countries became a destination for Russian capital fleeing the corruption and graft of Moscow. The Russian language was never banned, though, and an ethnic Russian is now the mayor of Latvia’s capital, Riga. All of this is something Russians never get told by their state-controlled media.
Having explained the horrors awaiting his Russian audience, Markov reaches a crescendo. “Crimea is not their main target, they really don’t care about it,” he continues. “Their main goal is to turn Ukraine into an anti-Russia within three years, install a Kiev version of [former Georgian President Mikheil] Saakashvili as president and then to start a rebellion in Russia proper.”
Any Russian reader will know that by “them,” Markov means the United States and its European allies, which becomes clear from the newspaper’s next question: “Will NATO deploy troops next to Rostov and Kursk [Russian cities near Ukrainian border]?”
“Had Putin failed to request permission [from parliament] to use force [in Ukraine], NATO would have gone much further than Rostov and Kursk—it would have been in Moscow. The goal of those who staged a coup d’etat in Kiev is to bring the likes of [Russian opposition leaders] Nemtsov and Navalny to power in Moscow. Russia would have been simply carved up,” answers Markov.
In recent years, Western strategists have shown little interest in post-Soviet politics, too busy dealing with the turmoil in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Northern Africa. But many Russians sincerely believe that all the West cares about is how to destroy their country.
Tell this to Russians brainwashed by state propaganda and they’ll be outraged: How come all the West cares about is how to destroy Russia? Libya, Egypt, Syria and now Ukraine are just preludes to the main attack—aimed like a missile at Moscow.
And Markov is fairly tame next to some of his compatriots. While Putin’s ministers are showing a degree of restraint, deputies in the State Duma, Russia’s Parliament, are letting their freak flags fly.
“So what—these Yankees, who shut their parliament when temperature drops to -15C, want to lecture us?! Dumbheads!!,” tweeted nationalist MP Ilya Drozdov, apparently referring to recent weather calamities on the East Coast. That was after he ripped off a few tweets mocking proposed new U.S. sanctions intended to punish Russia for the invasion. “Hooray!” he tweeted, hearing about the United States suspending military cooperation. “Hooray again!" he went on, hearing about the United States suspending trade talks with Russia. When word came of the Russian retaliation—the decision to re-introduce the ban on the U.S. pork—Drozdov wrote: "No entry for pigs from the USA.”
By invading Ukraine, MP Andrey Tumanov suggested in an interview with Sobesednik magazine, Russia is merely following America’s lead. “Russia should learn to be as shameless as the U.S. They live according to jungle laws. Anyone who is behaving decently and honestly they regard as a loser.”
Another MP, Vladimir Nikitin, waxed apocalyptic in an article on Ukraine for the regional website Pskovskaya Lenta. “The main battle of World War III is under way in Ukraine,” he writes. “The aggressor is Western civilization, which includes the U.S. and Europe.” After a long, unhinged rant, he concludes: “The American-style globalization has already led to a global crisis and may still lead to the demise of humanity.”
And here's the most depressing part: All of these views are completely mainstream in Russia.
In Russia, big lies spread by TV transform into gigantic ones after being processed by the rumor mill. As I was writing this story, a cleaning lady kindly informed me that U.S. troops had already invaded Western Ukraine. (They haven’t.)
The picture drawn by state-owned TV channels is only slightly more subtle: The Ukrainian protesters who overthrew President Viktor Yanukovych are proxies trained and armed by the United States.
This is how, on March 1, Channel 1 reported Obama’s initial anodyne statement on the Crimea crisis (“There will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.”): with bald-faced lies
The package starts off with Yury Vorobyov, the deputy head of Russia’s upper house, addressing the parliament. “We’ve heard President Obama saying that Russia would pay dearly for its policies. We know that Kiev militants have been trained in Lithuania and Poland ... I think that this statement by the U.S. president is a direct threat. He has crossed the line and insulted Russian people.”
Cut to footage of some cottages in the countryside. Presenter: “Experts have no doubt that coup experts were trained in Poland and Lithuania. Channel One has reported it. Training took place under the guise of a workshop. Our correspondent tried to enter, but was shoved away. The training was sponsored by European foundations.” The rather dull footage then shows some people standing around in a non-descript room, seemingly shot with a hidden camera.
Cut to another top-level Russian MP, Vyacheslav Shtyrov: “The U.S. played an important role in this. U.S. officials have openly admitted that they have invested a lot of money in order to create this situation.”
Again, the magic kernel: U.S. and European NGOs really have organized workshops for activists in post-Soviet countries, where they taught them how to organize peaceful protests. But the suggestion about military training is blatantly false.
***
The onslaught of grotesque propaganda has prompted many in Russia to talk about creating fact-checking organizations like those in the United States. Prominent lawyer Pavel Chikov, a human rights activist, has already started doing this. For example, he and others accused Channel One of showing footage of a busy checkpoint on the Ukrainian-Polish border during a story about thousands of Ukrainians allegedly fleeing into Russia. The Russian media initially reported 143,000 Ukrainian refugees. News wires have now reduced this number to five—persons, not thousands.
Activists also uncovered that an “eastern Ukrainian anti-fascist” who hoisted the Russian flag on the local government building in the city of Kharkiv was in fact a pro-Kremlin activist from Russia. They even found photo of him wearing a Nazi uniform. The man said he put it on for the purposes of “historical reconstruction.”
Finally, hundreds of social network users and journalists helped expose the Russian media and officialdom’s biggest lie: that heavily armed armed men wearing modern uniforms who took over Crimea are “local self-defense forces,” not regular Russian soldiers. The Ukrainian website stopfake.org has been created to accumulate such falsehoods and expose new ones.
With Russian civil society essentially barred from receiving financial aid from the West, this is one area where Western NGOs could actually help, because one doesn’t need to be physically present in Russia to undertake such online work.
And it’s not like Russians have no access to objective information, as in Soviet times. There are a couple of newspapers, several news portals and some monthly magazines that report to international standards, although all of these outlets are dogged by fears of a clampdown, which makes them prone to self-censorship. The only truly independent TV station—Dozhd—is facing closure after it was taken off all major satellite and cable networks under the ridiculous pretext of insulting WWII veterans.
But all of these outlets cater to a negligibly small audience, while the vast majority of Russians, around 73 percent, remain slaves to what they themselves call “the zombie box”—television, which is almost entirely under the Kremlin’s thumb.
Not just Russia, but the entire Russian-speaking world, which includes all former Soviet countries and huge Russian-speaking diasporas in the United States and Europe, badly needs a Russian-language equivalent of Al-Jazeera—or rather, many of them working on different platforms. Provided it stays independent and free, Ukraine, where at least half the population speaks Russian in everyday life, would be an ideal host for a project like that.
Perhaps that is why Vladimir Putin is so nervous.
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| love | Дата: Среда, 05.03.2014, 07:44 | Сообщение # 4 |
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| A War Tourist in Crimea
My diary from the first few days of Russia's latest conquest.
live in Ukraine right now is to feel you wake up in a different country each day. As Ukraine teeters on the edge of a war, or at least a few hot skirmishes, I sometimes find casting my mind back to 2010. That was when I first moved to Ukraine, just after my 31st birthday, in hopes of finding somewhere a little off the grid. Viktor Yanukovych had just been elected, and as staggering as it seems now, he was generally well received at the time. He was never a president to excite, but the man known as “Big Vik” promised a safe pair of hands for a country that had endured a traumatic couple of years—economy collapsing, down 15 percent in 2009, inflation biting at over 25 percent in 2008, and unemployment rocketing to 10 percent in 2009.
Yanukovych’s election was the final requiem for the Orange Revolution, which had turned out to be everything Ukrainians thought they were protesting against in 2004. And the country had something to look forward to, too: Euro 2012, the European soccer championship, which Ukraine proudly co-hosted with Poland. As the economy climbed out of trouble in 2010, inflation stabilized and Ukraine began to look forward to a brighter future.
Fast forward to Ukraine now: a country that, for all the excitement of this year’s uprising against Yanukovych, seems to have no future at all: currency plunging, inflation back, economy tanking and people going about their business looking physically shattered. A government that much of the country doesn’t think is a government—and whose new prime minister’s opening remarks were “Welcome to hell.” A Russian intervention in Crimea that some regard as an invasion, while others see it as liberation from a riotous gang of neo-Nazis.
Before this week’s drama, I’d never been to Crimea. I’d planned a first visit for May, when my parents were slated to make the trip from London. My mum found the idea of Crimea incredibly glamorous, having vaguely heard of it as the tropical retreat of the Soviet elite. My father was excited to pore over Crimean war battlefields. Now none of that’s to be, and my first, scrambled journey to the contested peninsula was to a place my parents were now begging me not to go.
Friday, Feb. 28
I set off for Crimea in the early morning after a few days in Odessa, the biggest city in southern Ukraine. I took my cat along for company on the seven-hour drive east, then sharply south, in the Rover 75 I drove over here last year from Britain. The route passes through the city of Mukolaiv, some 80 miles from Odessa and, as it happens, perhaps my favourite city in the country. I’d spent a weekend in Mukolaiv last November and found it something akin to a Soviet Narnia—a pocket of the USSR frozen in amber, with its legendary shipyards and other monuments to Soviet power. Apart from the public WiFi, it felt time hadn’t touched Mukolaiv for decades. As anti-Yanukovych protests were erupting in Kyiv in November 2013, Mukolaiv saw just a small spattering of townsfolk demonstrating near the city’s enormous Lenin statue.
Lenin's podium, with the statue itself now in storage. | Photograph courtesy of the author
Lenin, all 6 bronze metres of him, standing proudly over his own Lenin Square and just a hundred or so meters from similarly grand-scale Soviet monuments, seemed perfectly in his element. Truthfully, Kyiv’s own Lenin statue had long felt somewhat incongruous, casting his steely gaze on a supermarket and entertainment complex. That one fell on Dec. 8, 2013. In Mukolaiv, though, the founding ideologue of Soviet communism stood untouched until Feb. 22, the day of Yanukovych’s ouster, when a wave of Lenin-toppling washed across the country. A huge crowd turned out, some to actively protest, but many simply to look on in disbelief.
That disbelief was still there six days later when I arrived in the city and headed straight to Lenin Square and the now-vacated plinth. I watched Mukolaiv’s citizens react. Back in November, Lenin had seemed such an intrinsic part of the landscape that few paid him any mind. Now, everyone paused as they passed the 7-meter-high podium where Lenin once stood. (The statue itself is now in state storage, the Ukrainian flag that flew in his place in the aftermath, gone.) Some took photos, but there was no smiling. Others gazed up at the void above them, almost in reverie. I spoke to a couple of dozen Ukrainians milling around the statue and got very similar feedback: sadness. Sadness that their town’s grandest monument had simply gone. Others conveyed a sense of shame for letting it happen, as they spoke of “people from the west of Ukraine” coming and felling Lenin in a coordinated action. Only a very few didn’t mind his going. On the remaining stump, someone had scrawled “Lenin lives.”
***
The drive down to Crimea, through quiet, typically Ukrainian potholed roads, felt surreal. Yanukovych had just popped up a few hours earlier to give a press conference in Rostov-on-Don, a Russian city near the Ukrainian border, and claim his enduring legitimacy. He spoke of driving around the country after his ouster, fearing for his life and searching for support, a safe haven, before arriving in Crimea, where he either slipped out by superyacht or was airlifted by helicopter, depending on whom you read. I imagined him driving these very roads, cursing his fate and perhaps wishing he’d invested a bit more in road infrastructure.
Sketchy, early reports had circulated throughout Thursday of the Russian “invasion” of Crimea, starting with masked, armed men seizing the parliament before fanning out to take control of airports and military bases. With the situation seemingly changing every minute, it was hard to know what to expect when I made it to Crimea at around 11 p.m. Past the sign welcoming me to the “Autonomous Republic of Crimea”—the region had won its special status in the 1990s—there was initially nothing, for a hundred meters at least. Then, out of the darkness came a roadblock. Suddenly, armed men in camouflage, balaclavas and machine guns were crawling over my car. I somehow wasn’t worried; I actually found these men a little easier to deal with than the guys at the Kyiv protests because while my Russian is not bad, I speak no Ukrainian. In Crimea, nearly everybody speaks Russian, and a bit of language skills coupled with a cute cat and a bit of British charm, got me over the border and on to a quiet Simferopol, the Crimean capital, where I wandered about before retiring for the night.
Saturday, March 1
My humble lodgings in Simferopol were your standard Ukrainian deal, an apartment operating as a hostel but with no signs or anything declaring that, lest attention be attracted. The owner, Masha, a young Crimean girl, was friendly, nice. I chatted with her a little and asked if she was Ukrainian or Russian. She seemed genuinely not to know the answer, and was just hoping that things would calm down soon. Her only business for the moment was other freelancers, photographers mainly, hoping for sellable images of the action.
I first rushed down to the central Simferopol parliament, an impressive, somewhat pentagonal five-story building from the 80s. Ukraine traffic police had blocked off the surrounding area for about half a mile, and I found the parliament building surrounded by soldiers bristling with machine guns. (They wouldn’t say who they were but were clearly pro-Russia with Russia flags flying all around.) Yet the atmosphere was surprisingly calm, with locals chatting with the soldiers, posing for pictures, expressing their support. If this was a war, it didn’t look like one. I took a few photos then zipped back to the hostel to blog, with word now of all the peninsula’s airports under Russian occupation, traffic into the island heavily restricted or cancelled, and an escalating political crisis.
What I’d seen of Simferopol, its famous white train station and wide boulevards, I’d liked, but time was of the essence, meaning no chance to see the town’s signature Lenin Square (where he still stands). It was back in the Rover and on to Sevastopol, around 50 miles to the southwest on the Black Sea. The port city, Crimea’s largest with nearly 400,000 people, is an autonomous republic within an autonomous republic, of sorts. It has devolved constitutional powers and, as of last week, elected a Russian mayor who promptly refused to recognize the new Kyiv government and asked for Russian intervention.
Cruising to Sevastopol, one can’t help but be taken by the beauty of Crimea, its lush countryside and rolling hills. As I started to get close to Sevastopol, I saw something in the distance: a checkpoint with several Russian flags. Even amid all, this seemed surreal—I had already gone through one Russian checkpoint to get here. The rest of Crimea may be pro-Russian, but not exclusively so, with a 12 percent Crimean Tatar minority—strong opponents of the Russian takeover. Sevastopol, however, actually reported directly to Moscow for 30 years despite Crimea having been “gifted” to Ukraine for 60 years. “We are in Russia now,” a guard told me, while a sign declared, “Where we are, there is Russia.”
I arrived past the giant Soviet star commemorating Sevastopol’s “Hero City” status, inevitably winding my way to Lenin Street. There’s something of greatness about Sevastopol, with top architects from across the Soviet Union responsible for rebuilding the city, almost entirely (and almost entirely in white) after WWII.
The concert in Sevastopol. | Photo courtesy of the author
That night, I stumbled upon a mass pro-intervention concert in the city’s central square, complete with banners declaring their love for Russia, their resistance to the fascism they believe the rest of Ukraine has fallen under and their pride in their own monuments not being destroyed. A referendum on the enclave’s status had just been set for the spring, and a Russian declaration had just come through approving military intervention in the territory. The enthusiastic throng in Sevastopol viewed both as good news. Speaking to the Russian folk band before they went onstage, one of them told me, “This is a historic day for Crimea, after 60 years, returning to mother Russia.” A woman in her mid-40s, there with her children and mother, said, “My mother is almost 70. She can still remember Crimea when it was Russia. I want my children to know that.”
The concert finished, and it was time for me to leave Crimea. I’d done what I came to do—to be there on what did feel like a momentous day. Driving out of the peninsula, I passed a mass convoy of Russian troop carriers and military vehicles rolling steadily through the night. Stopping in Simferopol for a bit, I later made for the border, where I saw stepped-up checkpoints with Russian flags now flying prominently. But they liked my cat again, and the only thing they discovered in my glove compartment was my book of Russian grammar. Heading for Odessa, I passed through Mukolaiv once more. And it had changed from even two days earlier—another Russian checkpoint, this one some 130 miles from Crimea.
Once, Mukolaiv felt like the clocks had stopped. Now, as with everywhere here, it’s hurtling at the velocity of new Ukraine.
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