Rogues’ Gallery: Everyone Seems to Be against Crimea’s Annexation, but Who’s FOR It?; or, What Do Kim Jong-un and Ron Paul Have in Common?

On March 27th, the United Nations General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution declaring Crimea’s March 16th referendum and the ensuing annexation by Russia invalid.  The results were 100 to 11, with 58 abstentions.  Major countries like Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Burma, China, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, Pakistan, South Africa, Tanzania, and Vietnam abstained.

Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the U.N., tried to put a good face on the results.  “The fact that almost half of the members of the United Nations refused to support this resolution,” he said, “I think, is very encouraging.”  Churkin also called it “a moral victory” (i.e., in ordinary usage, a failure) “for Russian diplomacy.”

Vitaly Churkin

But which were the eleven countries that voted against the resolution, those who back the Russian annexation?  (And who else around the world, too?  We’ll get to that below.)  United States and other Western diplomats at the U.N. dubbed them, with shaky math, “the Dirty Dozen.”  Let’s take a little tour of the Dirty (Almost) Dozen—those governments that think Crimeans deserve self-determination (at the point of a gun) even, in some cases, more than their own citizens do.  Here are, not counting Russia itself, the ten defenders of freedom and democracy, bastions of the right to choose one’s own government:

North Korea

Possibly one of the most closed societies in the world, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as it is formally known, is a brutal dictatorship which has become the personal dynasty of a string of bloodthirsty, mentally unhinged tyrants from the Kim family, the latest of whom is the mannequin-like man-child Kim Jong-un.  The Kims have probably, among others, killed millions of their own countrymen through intentional starvation or in their Nazi-like prison camps—the fate of anyone who dares question governmental authority.  North Korea would, hands down, win any contest for “worst government in the world.”

Syria

Rivaling Kim Jong-un for 21st-century brutality is Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria, who bucked the Arab Spring revolutions’ democratization trend by digging in his heels and killing tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—in a cruel civil war, which has by now degenerated into a multi-ethnic and sectarian free-for-all.  The Syrian government does not think twice before using banned chemical weapons and merciless bombing campaigns against its own civilian population—anything to stay in power.  Oh, and did I mention?  Their closest (only?) ally is the Russian Federation.

Sudan

The Republic of Sudan’s Islamist military dictator, Omar al-Bashir, is one of the few current heads of state who has a price on his head for genocide, mostly because of the atrocities committed by his government against rebels and civilians in the Darfur region.  Sudan has sponsored and harbored Islamist terrorists, including al-Qaeda, since the 1990s, and it has a particular bone to pick with the United States, which dismembered Sudan by pushing, during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, for the secession of its southern half, as South Sudan, which robbed it of much of its oil wealth.  Of course, that secession, in 2011, was, unlike Crimea’s, a legitimate, internationally monitored referendum.

Zimbabwe

Possibly the bloodiest dictatorship in Africa, the Republic of Zimbabwe has been, since independence in 1980, under the thumb of Robert Mugabe, who has done everything in his power to jail and torture opposition leaders while steadily driving his country’s economy into a deep ditch.  It is possibly the world’s worst economic basket case.  Above is a photo of the fate met by many who dare to speak out against his rule.  Zimbabwe sides with Russia mainly to score a political point against meddling Westerners and their bourgeois concepts of “human rights.”

Belarus

The government of Belarus has been, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in lock-step with Russia on most foreign-policy questions—except in those cases where it is even more retrograde.  Its president, Alexander Lukashenko, is often called Europe’s last dictator.  Since 1996, Belarus and Russia have been all but merged in a so-called “Union State.”  Whether it even counts as an independent country is a matter of debate.  But even Lukashenko equivocated quite a bit when Crimea was first invaded and it looked as though he might break with Putin on this question.  Perhaps he was worried his country might get swallowed up two by Putin 2.0 and his new-found ultranationalism.  But with a flick of the wrist Putin could choke off Belarus’s energy supply and bring the country to its knees.  Well, economically it’s already on its knees.  Putin could kick it entirely to the ground.  When it came time for the vote in the U.N., Belarus sided with its larger neighbor.  There’s a good doggie.

Venezuela

Even after the death last year of Venezuela’s bombastic, authoritarian president, Hugo Chávez, oil-rich Venezuela has steered a geopolitical course that is resolutely anti-U.S.  Chávez’s “mini-me” successor, Nicolás Maduro, however, does not quite have the charisma to get away as easily with what Chávez got away with: jailing political opponents (or shooting them—there has been a lot of that in recent weeks with a popular uprising), shutting down newspapers when convenient, grabbing ever more expansive powers by tinkering with the constitution, and enacting wildly popular economic measures like ham-fisted price controls which lead directly to shortages and economic chaos.  Maduro, like Chávez, stays in power partly by thundering paranoid conspiracy theories about the U.S., a country which cares a lot less about Venezuela than Maduro would like to think.  This is why Venezuela—like Nicaragua (see below)—was one of the only major countries to recognize the Russian puppet states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia established in Georgia’s territory.  The U.N. vote on Crimea was yet another opportunity for Maduro to thumb his nose at the West (or, um, North).

Cuba

Through thick and thin

Cuba’s revolutionary socialist government—though it replaced a nasty, right-wing, American-backed regime and although it has been treated abominably by the U.S. in the foreign arena, to say the least—is one of Russia’s oldest allies in the Western hemisphere.  This is true even today, long after Russia has abandoned the Communist ideology that this decaying island nation naïvely clings to.  If the U.S. had treated Cuba openly and fairly all along, Cuba would probably be no more Communist today than the Czech Republic is.  As it happened, though, the pig-headed Castro brothers have dug in their heels and resolutely refused to offer their citizens freedom of the press, of political organization, or of religion.  Raúl Castro—like his brother and predecessor, Fidel before him—has done a lot for the well being of the Cuban people.  Too bad he doesn’t trust them enough to hold an election.  Cuba’s siding with Russia on the Ukraine question was another protest vote which has more to do with snubbing the U.S. than with anything going on in Crimea.

Nicaragua

Like Venezuela (see above), Nicaragua is one of the world’s few countries to recognize Russia’s South Caucasus puppet states, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  The ruling Sandinista (Communist, ex-Communist, whatever you want to call them) government is a lot more democratic and easy-going than it was in the 1980s, when the U.S. and Russia both used Nicaragua as a battleground for a bloody proxy war in the greater Cold War conflict.  Their leader, however, is the same, a much mellowed Daniel Ortega.  Like Cuba, this is a country that the U.S. has treated very badly.  Apparently, it’s still angry enough about that to risk its own international reputation by siding with the invasion of Crimea.

Bolivia

Sadly, Bolivia doesn’t really belong on this list.  Its president, Evo Morales, a full-blooded Aymara Indian, is a populist socialist who is no friend to U.S.-style capitalism, but he has none of the authoritarian instincts of Maduro, the Castros, or vintage Ortega.  By comparison, Bolivia is free and well-governed.  But Venezuela is eager to build a coalition of anti-U.S. and anti-western-European left-leaning states.  Of this small club, Argentina was smart enough to sit out the Crimea debate by abstaining at the U.N.; it is less interested in making new enemies than in making new allies (any allies) outside Latin America on the Falkland Islands question.  But Bolivia’s Morales jumped right into joining the least popular club in the world and has now made himself look like an apologist for war-mongering and despotism, which he isn’t.  This is bad for Bolivia—and may prove bad for Morales, too.

Armenia

Armenia’s president, Serzh Sargsyan (right), with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad

The Armenian people spent the decades of the Cold War carefully building up for themselves an international reputation as a courageous voice against genocide and imperialism.  Having suffered the former at the hands of Anatolian Turks a century ago and then the latter as a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, the West had great hopes for Armenia, as did the powerful Armenian-American political lobby in the U.S.  Then again, Turkey is in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and at the end of the day anti-Turkism seems to be a more defining feature of Armenian nationalism than anything else.  So Azerbaijan (which is Turkic-speaking) and Georgia drifted into the Western orbit in the post–Cold War order, while Armenia has become a pathetic little client state of Putin’s Russia.  Russia covertly and overtly helped Armenia carve the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh puppet state out of Azerbaijani territory, an atrocity on par with anything Russia has ever done.  And now Armenia has been slated to join Putin’s new “Eurasian Union”—the one he tried to bully Ukraine to join last year, which is how the whole Crimea mess started.  There is a lot of courage and decency among the Armenian people; in the current Armenian government, there is none of either.

But recently some light was shed on some of the arm-twisting that keeps Armenia allied with Russia.  Jirair Libaridian, a former advisor to the former Armenian president Levon Ter-Petrosian, told a news conference on March 26th that Putin had warned Armenia that if it formed a closer relationship with the European Union (E.U.) and did not join the Eurasian Union, then Russia would see to it that Armenia would lose its grip on the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.).  Ter-Petrosian was forced to resign in 1998 because of appearing too conciliatory on the Nagorno-Karabakh question, so Libaridian may not be in on the loop on current policy moves and has his own biases, but he stated firmly, “In my opinion, there is no other explanation to Armenia’s surprise U-turn.”  We may never know, but it seems likely that if Putin delivered a similar ultimatum to Armenia, it would support Crimea’s annexation as well.  In fact, the N.K.R. government also recognizes the Crimean annexation.  It may be that they are hoping that their “independence” might be made official soon.

Flag of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic

So much for the Dirty (Almost) Dozen.  What about the rest of the world?  Some of those abstentions in the U.N. vote were, in fact, sort of veiled votes of approval.

...

Central Asia—sort of

Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan abstained from voting on the U.N. resolution.  Kazakhstan, in particular, has much reason to worry about Putin’s born-again Soviet-revanchist imperialism.  After all, Kazakhstan is almost a quarter ethnic-Russian, and most of the Russians are ranged along the northern border with Russia.  After Communism fell, there were Cossack-led pushes for reversion to Russian rule along Kazakhstan’s border, including in the strategic, oil-rich Transcaspia region right across the Caspian Sea from the Caucasus.  After Crimea was invaded, Kazakhstan’s authoritarian president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, put his armed forces on high alert.  Only a quick consultation in person with Putin calmed him down.  But he’s still not on board with this whole annexation trend.

Nursultan Nazarbayev

Russia’s Muslim republics
“Welcome to the united family of Russia’s peoples!” shouted Zelimkhan Ozdoyev, an Ingushetian member of parliament, at a rally in Magas, the Ingush capital, shortly after Crimea’s annexation.  Wait a minute—aren’t Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis, Circassians, and other Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus victims of Russian imperialism?  Why have they so resolutely sided with the Kremlin?  Well, the people have their own ideas, but these Muslim republics are run by Putin appointees and were beaten into submission just before the nearby Winter Olympics in February.  On paper, at least, the North Caucasus is one of the most Russian parts of Russia.  Vasily Svetlichny, ataman (leader) of the Sunzhen host of Cossacks, was quoted in Vestnik Kavkaz, a Russian-language outlet for Caucasus news, as saying, “Ingushetia was one of first regions of Russia which responded to the events in Crimea and sent humanitarian aid to residents of the peninsula.  150 tons of cargo were collected.  I saw eyes, faces of Crimean residents and I can surely say that none of them doubted about being citizens of Russia. We also expressed solidarity to the Ukrainians, as what certain extremist politicians do is not connected with the nation.”  Of course, Cossacks are not Ingush; they are mostly ethnic Russians.  And the supposedly autonomous Ingush republic’s governmental structure is closely managed from the Kremlin.  So what do North Caucasus people actually think?  In Russia’s political climate, it is difficult to know.

Ingushetia has Crimea’s back—or at least its Cossacks do.

In central Russia, the president of the land-locked, predominantly-Muslim Republic of Tatarstan, Rustan Minnikhanov, who is himself a Tatar, was one of the first of the Russian Federation’s ethnic leaders to praise the Crimean annexation.  He flew to Simferopol to meet with the leaders of the pro-Russian, coup-installed junta shortly after its “declaration of independence,” and then lectured his own kindred, the Crimean Tatar minority there, against making too much trouble for their new Kremlin overlords.  Makes me wonder how one says “Uncle Tom” in Tatar.  More recently, in a more reasonable vein, Minnikhanov urged Putin to apply to Crimean Tatars Russia’s Rehabilitation Law of 1991, which gives rights and recognition to ethnic groups that suffered deportation during Josef Stalin’s dictatorship.  But this may be too little, too late.  Crimean Tatars feel betrayed, and Caucasus Emirate terrorists who have recently expanded into Tatarstan have a bad habit of assassinating leaders that they regard as collaborationist.

Rustan Minnikhanov (right) is president of Tatarstan
but not much of a friend to Crimean Tatars

Transniestria
The Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (a.k.a. Transnistria), a sliver of a puppet state carved out of Moldova along its border with Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union, is internationally unrecognized, but Russia has been paying its bills for almost a quarter-century and stationing troops there as well.  Transnistria has recently decided that it’s tired of such limbo and would like to join the Russian Federation as well, like Crimea.  It has already made a formal request.  But landlocked Transnistria would be a difficult-to-defend Russian exclave unless Moscow first did something like—oh, let’s just say, as an example—annexing southern Ukraine, including Odessa.  Patience, patience, Transnistria—Putin will get around to you once he’s taken care of this other business.

Near Transnistria is an officially recognized autonomous region within Moldova’s borders, the Autonomous Community of Gagauzia, which perhaps would not mind being annexed as well.  On April 3rd, Gagauzia’s governor, Mihail Formuzal, formally requested that the Russian government open a consulate in Comrat, the Gagauz capital.  As the state-run Russian news agency R.I.A. Novosti reported, “Formuzal underlined that Gagauz people can easily integrate into Russian society, because they know the Russian language and Russian culture.”  Hint, hint!

Transnistria’s foreign minister, Nina Shtanski, has formally requested
annexation to Russia

Already, Transnistria is showing it is a loyal ally.  The enclave’s State Security Committee (K.G.B.) (yes, it still calls it that) reported that it had successfully shot down a Ukrainian military drone that had strayed, intentionally or not, into Transniestria’s self-proclaimed airspace.

Crimean Karaites
Much has been said of late about the plight of the Crimean Tatar people (see above), who vigorously opposed the annexation of their homeland by Russia.  But another religious minority in the peninsula, the Karaites, appear to have supported the land grab.  Karaites, also called Karaym or Karaylar, are a Turkic-speaking people who have lived in Crimea for centuries and regard it as their homeland.  They follow a stripped-down version of Judaism—they recognize the Torah but not the Talmud—but are believed not to be descendants of Israelites.  Thousands of Crimean Karaites live in Israel, the U.S., and elsewhere, but those remaining in Crimea number only about 800, according to some figures, with as many or more living in mainland Ukraine.  Vladimir Ormeli, who heads the All-Ukrainian Organization of Crimean Karaites, said this week, “In Crimea, the majority of Karaites support annexation to Russia, and voted for it.  Culture and people connect us with Russia, more than Ukraine.  But this is a complicated conversation.”  Ormeli’s description of the Euro-Maidan movement sounds like Kremlin talking points: “We were afraid of these wild events.  We were afraid that these would happen in Crimea.”

But is it good for the Jews?  Crimea’s Karaites welcome their new Kremlin overlords.

Transcarpathian and Magyar nationalists
Ethnic Russians are not the only minorities in Ukraine wary of the new anti-Kremlin regime in Kiev.  Jobbik, the right-wing extremist Magyar nationalist party in neighboring Hungary which this week won more than a fifth of the votes in national elections, has watched with growing irritation what it sees as the rise of a Ukrainian ultranationalist government (though it is nothing of the sort) and what it sees as an imminent erosion of the rights of linguistic minorities in Transcarpathia, the Ukrainian oblast bordering Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania.  Jobbik’s leadership condemned Hungarian government support for E.U.–Ukraine ties as “an overt act of treason.”  István Szávay, a Jobbik member of Hungary’s parliament, said that the 150,000 or so Magyars (Hungarians) (12% of the oblast’s population) and perhaps as few as 10,000 Slavic-speaking Ruthenians in Transcarpathia desired and deserved some form of autonomy.  Jobbik’s leader in parliament, Márton Gyöngyösi, called the Crimean referendum “exemplary” and a triumph for democracy and self-determination.  The political alignment with Moscow here is consistent with recent reports suggesting that the Kremlin is providing covert aid, funding, and talking points to Jobbik as part of a multi-pronged effort to discredit the current Ukrainian government.

It is still not clear to what extent Hungarians and other Transcarpathian minorities like Ruthenians might share Jobbik’s views.  The head of the Hungarian Cultural Federation in Transcarpathia (Kárpátaljai Magyar Kulturális Szövetség, or KMKSZ), László Brenzovics, met on March 26th with the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.  They agreed that the safety of Magyars in Transcarpathia should be a priority for Budapest, but they also share the goal of eventual Ukrainian integration with western Europe.

Jobbik armbands on parade

Then, on March 28th, about 200 to 300 people demonstrated in front of the Hungarian foreign-ministry offices in Budapest, carrying signs like, “Autonomy for Transcarpathia!” and “Hungary Wants Transcarpathia Back!”  The event was organized by Tamás Gaudi-Nagy, a Jobbik parliamentarian who stated, “It would serve historic justice if Transcarpathia were separated from Ukraine.”  Between the world wars, Transcarpathia—called Zakarpattia Oblast in Ukrainian and formerly known as either Transcarpathian Ruthenia—was the eastern tail end of the multiethnic Czechoslovakia.

The flag of Ukrainian Transcarpathia

Serbs

The Republic of Serbia’s delegation to the U.N. abstained from the resolution condemning the annexation.  This is a difficult one for Serbia, since Russia has been very kindly using its U.N. Security Council veto to block secessionist Kosovo’s admission to the General Assembly.  It seems that, in this supposedly parallel or converse situation, supporting the Crimean annexation is only good manners.  On the other hand, Serbia would like to join the E.U., and siding with Russia here would almost certainly slow that process down, if not derail it.  This, of course, is the identity crisis that looms large over Serbian electoral politics.  The far right in Serbia is unequivocal, though: extremist “Chetnik” mercenaries are in Crimea now, “defending” it for Russia (as described earlier in this blog).

Serbian “Chetnik” mercenaries in Crimea last month

And Milorad Dodik, president of Republika Srpska, the self-governing Serb half of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been emboldened by the Crimean referendum to propose splitting up Bosnia into three entities.  As he put it on April 1st (and they don’t have April Fool’s Day in Banja Luka), “Our next step is the opening of a dialogue—on the restructuring of Bosnia as a confederation consisting of three states.  If this proves impossible, Republika Srpska retains the right to hold a referendum on its status.”

Steven Siegal
But what does the martial-arts-film star, one-time aspirant Arizona governor, and former child-trafficking suspect Steven Seagal think about the crisis in Ukraine?  If you’re like me, that was your first thought.  As discussed at the time in this blog, Seagal (age: 62; estimated I.Q.: 7) broke his silence early on, by giving an interview for one of Russia’s creepy, Orwellian English-language television stations, rattling off Kremlin talking points on the Ukraine crisis, including all the big words, with the help of cue-cards.  Seagal has called Putin “one of the great living world leaders” and has contemplated taking Russian citizenship.  I wonder if he’s waiting for anyone on this side of the pond to talk him out of it.

Vlad and Steve, a match made in heaven

Ron Paul
The American libertarian rock star and frequent presidential candidate Ron Paul has, oddly, become one of Russia’s most vocal supporters—but then everything about Paul is kind of odd.  Putin, Paul said on Fox News, “is no angel but actually he has some law on his side.  They have contracts and agreements and treaties for a naval base there and the permission to go about that area.”  He added, “There is a right to secession.”  Other Libertarian leaders were quick to shout down Paul’s views as un-libertarian.  Alexander McCobin, a former Cato Institute associate and current executive director of Students for Liberty, carefully enumerated the annexation’s illegalities and called it an invasion.

Daniel Adams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Security, shot back at McCobin on Paul’s behalf: “We know what an invasion looks like—it’s called shock and awe and it happened eleven years ago this month, in the U.S. illegal invasion of Iraq.  It happened fifteen years ago this month over the skies of Serbia, another illegal U.S. attack.  If it had happened earlier this month in Crimea would we not have video?  Everyone has cell phones these days.  Surely if the referendum had been taken at gunpoint we would have seen evidence of those on the receiving end.  Or does [McCobin] wish us to believe that the Russian military rounded up more than 80% of the population and forced 93% of those to vote in favor of joining Russia without having to shoot a single Crimean?  That sounds like a pretty wild conspiracy theory.”  Um, Dan?  You’ve got a little bit of foam on your lip ... nope, still there ... nope, still there ... okay, now you got it.

... and meanwhile Paul’s pimpin’ for Putin.

Lyndon LaRouche
Even farther along the mental-illness spectrum is another perennial presidential candidate, Lyndon LaRouche, now 91 years old, who has in the past been famous for claiming that the United Kingdom’s royal family is a drug-smuggling empire and the direst threat to the security of the United States.  Russian media this month have dragged him out of his nursing home and put a microphone in front of him, and he complied by ranting about the Nazis and U.S. mercenaries that are running Ukraine and how the Crimea issue is being used by the West as a way to bully “Eurasia.”  This echoes statements earlier in his career, in which he said that he was the target of assassination plots by “Communists, Zionists, narcotics gangsters, the Rockefellers and international terrorists,” adding, in a 1973 statement, “My enemies are the circles of McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Soviet President Yuri Andropov, W. Averell Harriman, certain powerful bankers, and the Socialist and Nazi Internationals, as well as international drug traffickers, Colonel Qaddafi, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the Malthusian lobby.”  Ah, yes, the dreaded Malthusian lobby.  Man, when those fuckers paint a target on you you’re toast.  LaRouche’s new line is that Barack Obama is going to use Crimea as a pretext for starting a “thermonuclear war.”

Lyndon LaRouche

Dana Rohrabacher
On Washington’s Capitol Hill, the strongest voice in defense of the annexation of Crimea may well be Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican who represents Orange County, California, in the U.S. House of Representatives.  As Rohrabacher put it to U.S. News and World Report, “Starting with our own American Revolution, groups of people have declared themselves, rightfully, to be under a different government or a government of their choosing.  People forget that’s what our Declaration of Independence is all about.”  (Russia’s only other defender on Capitol Hill is Alan Grayson, a Democrat who represents part of Orlando, Florida, and seems to have decided he doesn’t need the Cuban-American vote.)  He also said, “From what I understand, what happened in Crimea, not one person was killed,” before adding, “Okay, maybe one.”  But why is the man whose constituency includes Ronald Reagan’s first campaign headquarters, John Wayne International Airport, and the Richard Nixon birthplace so eager to side with big bad Russia?  Well, the answer is a bit odd.  Rohrabacher is something of a nut when it comes to changing borders.  He’s never met a separatist movement he doesn’t like.  He wants Pakistan’s Balochistan region to become independent, he wants South Azerbaijan to secede from Iran and join Azerbaijan (in this, he has allied himself with Crimea’s Azeri minority in the past), and he has loudly voiced support for separatism in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, and anywhere and everywhere.  He even thinks a Republican “South California” should secede from his home state and that other parts of California should be allowed to join Mexico if they choose.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher

“A lot of my colleagues,” Rohrabacher complained recently, “can’t get over that the Cold War is over.”  Of course everyone knows that Cold War is over.  But the new one, unfortunately, has only just begun.  And, also unfortunately, everyone’s going to be asked to take sides.

Russian holiday-goers at a Crimean beach cheer news of Putin’s annexation of the peninsula.

[You can read more about separatist movements famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

What Next after Crimea’s “Referendum”?

Crimean Russians celebrating their referendum result

Two major votes were held on Sunday, March 16th.  In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea), parliamentary elections were held for the country’s 687 constituencies.  In each one, only one candidate ran, and that candidate was hand-picked by Kim Jon-un’s Communist dictatorship.  In each case, the candidate received 100% of the votes, without any abstentions.  The turnout was 99.97%—slightly down from the turnout in 2009, which was 99.98%.  The official news agency explained that the results affirmed “the absolute support and trust of all voters” in the central government.  Elections like this defy parody, although the satirical newspaper the Onion does its best, as in a 2007 report that Kim Jong-il’s “approval rating plummets to 120%.”

Democracy, Crimean style

The other vote on Sunday was, of course, the referendum in Crimea on whether to join the Russian Federation, and the results there should be given no more credence and taken no more seriously as an actual mandate than those from North Korea.  As in North Korea, the ballot did not really offer a choice, and, as in North Korea, the vote was held in an atmosphere of terror and military rule.

This is what Crimeans were told their choices were.
In reality, they had no choice at all.

Three weeks ago, so-called “self-defense forces” and other paramilitaries—in actual fact, Russian-equipped regulars or irregulars taking orders directly from the Kremlin—forcibly took over the parliament and all government buildings in the Republic of Ukraine’s constituent Autonomous Republic of Crimea and installed a pro-Kremlin leadership (as reported at the time in this blog).  On March 11th, the new unelected parliament declared an intent to secede from Ukraine with the ultimate goal of joining the Russian Federation.  The referendum held on the 16th offered two choices: (1) joining the Russian Federation and (2) remaining part of Ukraine under the terms of the 1992 constitution.  But both options amount to the same thing.  The 1992 constitution was implemented after Crimea’s first referendum and declaration of independence (later retracted), in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The 1992 constitution granted Crimea broad autonomy and the right to chose its own path, up to and including possibly secession.  The constitutional reforms following the Orange Revolution of 2004 left less leeway for Crimea, putting its constitution under the authority of Ukraine’s.  So returning to the 1992 constitution means awarding the Crimean government the right to secede—and join Russia.  The result is the same.

“Heads, I win; tails, you lose”
Even so, on Sunday the annexation-to-Russia option got 96.77% of the vote, with 2.51% for the 1992-constitution option.  Turnout was reported as over 80%.  There were no exit polls, but indications are that the Crimean Tatar minority, who are between 12% and 13% of the population, boycotted the referendum, and so probably did many ethnic Ukrainians, who are just under a quarter of the population.  (Most residents are ethnically Russian.)  In Sevastopol, which within Ukraine’s internal structure is, like the capital, Kiev (Kyiv), an oblast- (province-) level municipality separate from the Autonomous Republic of Ukraine, a separate referendum was held, since Sevastopol had also been taken over by Russian forces.  (Sevastopol is about 72% ethnic-Russian and about 22% ethnic-Ukrainian.)  There, annexation to Russia was approved 95.60% to 3.37%.  Initial official pronouncements that the Sevastopol vote had an 80% turnout were called into suspicion when outside observers took a closer look at the numbers.  It seems 474,137 residents cast ballots, even though at last count Sevastopol’s voting-age population was 385,462.  An election worthy of Kim Jong-un indeed: turnout in Sevastopol was 120%.

The following day, March 17th, the unelected Russian-installed legislatures and governments of both Crimea and Sevastopol declared independence together as the new Republic of Crimea.  The word Autonomous was dropped, since of course that word implies autonomy from and within something.  Almost immediately, President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was recognizing its independence, and the Russian parliament began a fast-tracked process to admit the Republic of Crimea to the Russian Federation.

So what happens next?  Here is a rundown of how things might proceed from here on out:

Crimea’s status
Crimea has now joined the world’s small club of partially recognized status, those which are recognized by some other sovereign states but not enough (or not the right ones, since Russia, the United States, and China can veto applications) to be in the United Nations General Assembly.  Others include the State of Palestine, the Republic of China (Taiwan), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (mostly occupied by Morocco), the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (recognized only by Turkey), and two Russian puppet states within Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia (more on them below).

But Russia will probably not bother to cajole knee-jerk anti-U.S. countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua and development-funds-hungry Pacific islets like Tuvalu and Nauru to recognize Crimea, as it has successfully done with Abkhazia and South Ossetia (as discussed earlier in this blog).  Instead, independence is here just an antechamber to annexation.  This may happen within a matter of months.  Already Crimea has adopted the ruble, and the Russian military is its de facto defense force.  At that point a much larger contingent of countries than the Georgian republics’ short list of diplomatic partners might formally recognize Crimea as part of Russia, and this would especially be true of the former Soviet republics lined up to join Putin’s new Eurasian Union trade bloc—Belarus and Kazakhstan—as well as those currently negotiating their entry, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.  Tajikistan and Uzbekistan might or might not follow suit.  But this is largely academic.  After all: most countries in the world engage with Taiwan, and with the unrecognized Republic of Somaliland, both politically and economically, as sovereign nations while not diplomatically recognizing them as separate from China or Somalia, respectively.

As a new member of the Federation, the Republic of Crimea would not, at that point, have to change its name.  The 83 members of the Russian Federation include 20 “republics,” mostly named for distinct nationalities like Chechens, Karelian Finns, Kalmyks, Volga Tatars, or Tuvans.  In fact, Putin will probably make at least a very good show of granting Crimea some of the genuine self-government that the Federation’s 83 “federal subjects” were promised under President Boris Yeltsin but then later denied when Putin came to power.  The Republic of Tatarstan and the Chechen Republic, in particular, had their nominal autonomy stripped from them and are now ruled by Kremlin-appointed governors.  On the other hand, even if Putin allows sham elections for governor in a way that he does not in Tatarstan or Chechnya, the spectacle of this week’s “referendum” indicates that the result might be the same: direct rule, with phrases like “autonomous republic” being a cruel Orwellian joke, just as it was in Soviet times.  Which brings us to ...

Crimean Tatars
But, unlike Chechnya and Tatarstan, Crimea is overwhelmingly ethnic-Russian.  The closest thing to a titular national group the republic has is the Crimean Tatars, the peninsula’s indigenous Turkic-speaking Muslims, who were deported en masse by Josef Stalin in the 1940s and have only in recent years begun to trickle home.  They make up between 12% and 13% of the population at last count (or less, since those numbers do not include Sevastopol, which has almost no Tatars).  Gone for good now, surely, is the special arrangement by which Tatars were guaranteed, as the indigenous people, a certain share of seats in the Crimean parliament.  But the loud expressions of concern in the West and in the international community for the beleaguered and despised Tatars have already maneuvered Putin into declaring that the linguistic and cultural rights of Tatars will be respected and protected.  He especially needs to make this point because it was just this sort of protection which the entire invasion of Crimea was supposed to offer to the supposedly oppressed Russian language and culture under the supposedly fascist and neo-Nazi and anti-Russian government which took power in Ukraine when President Viktor Yanukovych (whom Russia still recognizes as the Ukrainian president) fled the country.  But if Putin was able to convincingly lie to Russians and Crimeans about those supposed atrocities, will he also be able to lie to them about atrocities that might now occur against Tatars?  It is possible.  Make no mistake, it is unlikely that Putin will actually go after the Tatars.  (Some of the complexities of the Tatar situation were explored last week in an article in this blog.)  So long as they are too scared to stage an uprising, he won’t feel it necessary; he already has Crimea.  But among the armed groups controlling the Crimean peninsula right now are not only Russian regular soldiers but actual “self-defense groups” (i.e. ad hoc armed militias of ethnic Russians, some but not all of them Kremlin-paid provocateurs), Cossacks, Russian motorcycle gangs, and pro-Kremlin mercenaries from Serbia, Chechnya, and perhaps elsewhere.  No one knows to what extent the Kremlin will be able to control these groups if interethnic violence somewhow erupts and, God forbid, an actual pogrom begins.  This, of course, is what Tatars fear.  And a pogrom could change all of the international dynamics regarding Crimea—in particular stoking jihadist insurgencies in the rest of Russia, turning Volga Tatars in Tatarstan against their Kremlin-appointed Uncle Tom president, and inviting military intervention by Turkey or Azerbaijan.

Russian policy toward religious minorities circa 1847.
Let’s hope there’s been some evolution since then.

The rest of Ukraine
But what of the rest of Ukraine, where Russian-speakers dominate in the eastern and southern areas?  On March 5th, a mysterious provocateur and former neo-Nazi named Pavel Gubarev led an armed takeover by ethnic Russians of the government buildings in Donetsk, an industrial in eastern Ukraine, and declared an independent Donetsk Republic, with an explicit invitation for Russia to invade and “defend” them (as reported at the time in this blog).  Gubarev was arrested the next day by Ukrainian federal police, and unrest has been simmering in the city—capital of the ethnic-Russian Yanukovych’s home oblast—since then, including lethal rioting.  Some of the same ingredients are in place that preceded the Crimean takoever—a call for Russian help, demonstrations full of Kremlin-imported provocateurs teetering toward uncontrollable violence, and talk of the “fascists” running Ukraine now.  One difference is that neither Donetsk Oblast nor any of the other Russian-dominated ones (Luhansk, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, etc.) is a coherent historical entity in the way that Crimea is.  Another is that it is tougher to draw a line between ethnic-Russian-dominated and ethnic-Ukrainian-dominated areas of the mainland.  Nonetheless, many ordinary Ukrainians fear that a Russian invasion of the Ukrainian mainland could begin at any moment.  Officially, Putin says that he has no plans to annex Ukraine, but that’s exactly what he said about Crimea mere weeks ago.  Officially, Putin has proposed that as a “compromise,” what remains of Ukraine become a politically neutral federative state, barred from ever joining the European Union (E.U.) or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with the oblasts converted to autonomous republics able to govern themselves and to align themselves economically and geopolitically as they please.  This would be a recipe for fragmentation and, if implemented, it would create a Donetsk Republic, a Kharkiv Republic, etc., and these would follow Crimea in joining the Federation.  More likely, Putin means this as an opening offer in a set of negotiations just beginning in which he assumes he holds all the cards.  A more radical proposals, which may yet become ascendant among Russian ultra-nationalists in Ukraine, is one mooted by Russians in Crimea last month (as reported at the time in this blog): to put the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine (at that point Crimea was envisioned as part of it) together in something called the Federated States of Malorossiya, using the name “Little Russia” which in Czarist times was used to describe much of Ukraine.  Kharkiv would be its capital—this having been the interim capital of the Bolshevik-ruled Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (S.S.R.) during the Russian Civil War in the late 1910s, when anti-Kremlin forces controlled Kiev.  Kharkiv, next to Donetsk, has been the scene of most of the worst unrest in recent weeks.  One thing is clear: Putin wants as much of Ukraine as possible, and he seems inclined to push things as far as he can.

Russia’s other puppet states—Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria
For the moment, Crimea is in the same category as the partially recognized republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (see above), which split away from the newly independent Georgia in the early 1990s amid civil war and then were declared fully independent in 2008 after Russia defeated Georgia handily in response to a Georgian attempt to retake the territories.  Recognized only by Russia, Tuvalu, Nauru, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are in many ways part of the Russian Federation already.  The majority of their citizenry holds Russian passports, and their athletes have competed as Russians in the Olympics (as discussed in this blog).  In 2012, all those Russian passport-holders in the republic went strongly for Putin in an election that treated the territories as separate electoral constituencies.  However, South Ossetian and Abkhazian leaders and residents are getting impatient.  Many of them feel that they lack both the legitimacy of fully recognized statehood and the perks that come from being a full-fledged member of the Russian Federation.  In the long term, Putin talks about them joining the Eurasian Union as full members, which would be an enhancement of their independence and would economically integrate them more closely with Russia.

But the fast-tracking of Crimean accession to the Federation is likely to increase Abkhaz and Ossetian frustration.  It is not clear why Putin has not absorbed them already.  There are a few possible factors.  One, it would further antagonize Georgia and, by extension, the West and the international community.  But the events of the past month show a sharp shift by Putin, who seems very explicitly to no longer care who criticizes him internationally.  Second, Russians are minorities in the two republics, unlike in Crimea (only 9% in Abkhazia, where Abkhaz are just over 50%, and 3% in South Ossetia, where two-thirds are Ossetes).  He could not use the same arguments about “protecting Russians abroad” as he does for Crimea.

Victors in the South Ossetia War, Putin’s 2008 dress rehearsal for Crimea

Third, there are security issues.  Abkhazia is mostly Christian, but it is 15% Muslim, most of those being Abkhaz.  And the Abkhaz are considered part of the larger Circassian ethnic group whose plight cast a shadow over the Winter Olympics last month in Sochi and is the rationale for the Islamist insurgency that has turned the North Caucasus into a war zone; North Caucasus Islamists helped out when Abkhaz fought for and won its de facto independence from Georgia after the fall of Communism.  Circassians are mostly moderate Muslims, and Abkhaz Muslims even more so, but so were most Caucasus Muslims in Russia until the Chechen Wars radicalized them.  Annexing Abkhazia might cause the insurgency to spread there.  South Ossetia is mostly Christian and it will probably want to reunite with North Ossetia, which is in Russia and is also predominantly Christian (as discussed in this blog).  But the Islamist terrorist Caucasus Emirate movement claims North Ossetia as part of its territory, so this complicates things.  Also, annexing South Ossetia and Abkhazia would make tens of thousands of ethnic Georgians into Russian Federation citizens, something that is not currently the case.  This would drive Russia and Georgia much further apart (again, to the extent that Putin cares about things like that anymore).

Putin with Abkhazia’s president, Alexandr Ankvab

But there are ethnic Russians in Transnistria, the Russian-backed but as yet unrecognized puppet state carved in 1990 out of the eastern sliver of newly-independent Moldova.  (It is also called Trans-Dniester, Transdniestria, and, formally, the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic.)  Here, the parallels with Crimea are much stronger.  But the numbers are not as Kremlin-friendly.  At last count, Transnistria was about perfectly evenly divided among Moldovans (i.e. Romanians), Russians, and Ukrainians, with ethnic Moldovans having a slight edge.  Here, though, is where nearly all of the former Moldavian S.S.R.’s Russians live.  And Putin has made the protection of ethnic Russians who, in the famous phrase, went to sleep in the Soviet Union and woke up the next morning in foreign countries a priority. It would be easy for him to manufacture a provocation for an invasion.  But he is unlikely to do this until he has to some extent managed to annex Ukraine’s Odessa oblast, which borders Transnistria; this would link Transnistria up with the Russian heartland via Crimea.  Annexing Transnistria would also have the benefit of balkanizing Moldova in the way that is happening in Ukraine, and also create a territorial conflict that would permanently discourage Moldova from joining the E.U. or NATO—which most Moldovans want to do, probably in the form of reunification with Romania.  A further complication is the autonomous republic of Gagauzia within Moldova, 82% of the population of which are Gagauz—a Turkic-speaking ethnic group, most of whom are Orthodox Christians.  (Moldovans and Bulgarians each make up 5% of Gagauzia’s population, and Russians are about 4%.)  Gagauzia last month held a referendum (reported on at the time in this blog) in which 99% of citizens said they wanted to declare independence if Moldova attempted Romanian unification.  That won’t happen anyway, so long as Moldova still claims Transnistria, but in that same referendum 98% of Gagauzians said they wanted closer ties with Putin’s Eurasian Union, not with the E.U.  So Gagauz they may be, but they seem very open to being convinced that joining the Russian Federation would be a good idea.

[Mere hours after this blog post was written, a reader called my attention to today’s news development: Transnistria is indeed formally appealing to Moscow for membership in the Russian Federation.  I will be blogging on this soon.]

The other unrecognized puppet state in the former Soviet Union is the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.), an ethnic-Armenian-dominated enclave within the Republic of Azerbaijan which the newly independent Republic of Armenia conquered in 1991 and established as a puppet state, heavily funded by the ultranationalist Armenian-American diaspora.  Since Azerbaijan, a Turkic-speaking country, is strongly aligned with Turkey, the U.S., and NATO and against their traditional enemy Iran, and since Armenians regard any Turks as devils, Russia quietly supported Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh War and supports the N.K.R. as well, but neither it nor Armenia has formally recognized it.  If Putin succeeds in annexing Crimea, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria, and if, as expected, Armenia joins the Eurasian Union, there is no reason why he would not try something similar in Nagorno-Karabakh.  While Armenians are strongly nationalistic enough to not want to be part of the Russian Federation, these developments might still prompt a full Russian and Armenian diplomatic recognition of the N.K.R. and its membership in the Eurasian Union.

Other former Soviet republics with ethnic-Russian populations
But beyond Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, there are other parts of the former Soviet Union where there are ethnic Russians.  The highest numbers are in the Baltic States, especially Latvia, which was traumatically divided in its opinions in 2012 over a referendum on whether to grant Russian the status of an official language.  Russian-speakers make up just over a quarter of Latvia’s population, and they are highly concentrated in the east, forming a majority for example in Dagauvpils, Latvia’s second-largest city (and 40% of the capital, Riga).  Around the time of the referendum (as reported at the time in this blog), there were attempts by Russian nationalists to link their autonomist cause with that of the Latgalians, a Latvian cultural group who sometimes consider themselves a separate nationality and whose territory includes Dagauvpils.  Those efforts failed, as did the referendum, narrowly.  Despite these dynamics, however, which echo the demographic situations in Moldova and Ukraine that make these “soft targets” for Putin’s imperialism, the Baltic States—the other two are Estonia and Lithuania—are safe.   In 2004, the three Baltic States joined the E.U. and NATO.  Any military moves by Putin on their territories would put Russia on an immediate war footing with the U.S., France, the United Kingdom and 25 other countries.  That could mean nuclear war.  He has already exerted some economic pressure on the Baltics, but NATO warplanes have stepped up their flyovers of Baltic territory, so he won’t touch them, much as he’d like to.

Plenty of Russians (shown in red) live outside the Russian Federation.

Belarus, which still has a Soviet-style dictatorship in place and is often called the least free country in Europe, is only 8% Russia, as against 84% Belarussian, but that ethnic and linguistic divide is fairly blurry.  Belarus has even less of a history as a state independent of Russia than Ukraine does.  In the late 1990s, Yeltsin wove the two countries together as the Union State of Belarus and Russia, and it is as close to being annexed to Russia as one could formally be.  It is lock-step loyal in its foreign policy, and Belarussians do not seem to care much if they are in Russia or in independent Belarus.  In fact, joining Russia could hardly leave them worse off.  This is low-hanging fruit.  Consider Belarus part of Russia already.

Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko

A bit more complicated are the formerly-Soviet republics of Central Asia.  Kazakhstan, in particular, is about 24% ethnic Russian and about 63% Kazakh, with most of the Russians concentrated in the north, along the Russian border.  When Communism fell in 1990, it was more like 40% Russian and 38% Kazakh, before Russians began emigrating in great numbers.  But among the Russians who remain are some Cossacks.  The Semirechye Cossacks declared the independence of Kazakhstan’s northern reaches right after Kazakhstan’s own independence was thrust upon it, with the idea that they would eventually join Russia.  That never got momentum, and nor did another secessionist movement around the same time, in Ust’-Kamengorsk (now Oskemen), capital of East Kazakhstan oblast.  Today, Cossack separatism in Kazakhstan is concentrated in the formerly Russian region of Transcaspia, notably Mangystau oblast, where Russians make up a third and Kazakhs about half of the population.  As its name suggests, that is right on the Caspian Sea, which means it is a highly strategic region for controlling Central Asia’s energy resources.  And if Transcaspia is annexed, just next door to the east is Uzbekistan’s Republic of Karakalpakstan, which U.S. diplomats have called a powderkeg with a roiling separatist movement by the Turkic-speaking Karakalpaks, a situation in that closed society about which little is known.  Karakalpaks are just over a third of the population; an unknown number is Russian.  Will Putin decide that they—and their energy resources—need “protecting” too?  If so, Putin might use some of the same historical arguments as he uses in Crimea, and he might have Kazakhstan—already a Eurasian Union founding member—on his side as well: Karakalpakstan was part of the Kazakh S.S.R. until Stalin transferred it to the Uzbek S.S.R. in 1936, as a way of dividing the Kazakh population, to whom Karakalpaks are more closely related than to Uzbeks.

The Republic of Karakalpakstan: just to its west is Transcaspia,
whose Cossacks want to rejoin Russia

Would Putin really move to take (i.e. retake) more territory in Central Asia?  This worried Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Kazakh president, who put his armed forces on high alert when Crimea was invaded and stepped up patrols along the border with Russia.  Putin had to summon him to Moscow and reassure him—and when I say reassure, I mean threaten—that Ukraine tipping to the West would hurt the Eurasian Union as a whole.  Turkmenistan is the most economically independent of the Central Asian republics, but Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are, like Kazakhstan, susceptible to Kremlin pressure.  Does this mean that Putin will carve out the pieces of those countries that he wants, or does that mean that he doesn’t feel he has to?  Time will tell.

Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev: is his country next?

International response
And what of the international community’s response to all this?  Russia’s ally on the U.N. Security Council, abstained from the Council’s vote in which Russia vetoed a U.S. resolution condemning the annexation of Crimea.  For China, the Crimean adventure smells too much like “separatism,” which Russia is also, hypocritically, nominally against.  As for the West, sanctions are already being imposed by the U.S. and the E.U., but there is not much to them so far.  Germany is leading the faction in the E.U. making the argument—it doesn’t put it quite like this, though—that Russia and western Europe are too economically entangled, with too many oligarchs parking their money in Western banks and too much oil and natural gas flowing east to west, for any sanctions against Russia not to harm the West as well.  President Barack Obama’s critics, including Senator John McCain, think the U.S. should be proactively arming Ukraine.  This assumes that if Russia invades Ukraine’s mainland, it will make sense to mount a full military defense.  Even with Western arms, Ukraine would lose such a war.  Their choice would be to roll over, let Russia take half their country, and hope for sanctions and diplomacy and a better day farther down the road, or fight and maybe lose the entire country.  No one wants a nuclear war, so there’s very little the West can reasonably do that it is not already doing to retaliate against Russia.  The Cold War is over; this isn’t about socialism or capitalism or freedom or anything else.  It’s about raw, imperial power.  The U.S. and NATO invades places like Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan so they can put in the governments they want and expand their control, and Russia does the same where it wants to.  There’s no “global policeman”—certainly not the U.N., whose main function is to protect the shared interests of the Security Council permanent members and ignore the unshared interests.  No, this is just history as it’s always been.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

[Thanks to Mike Hitchcock.]

Related articles from this blog:
“Islam and the Second Crimean War: Russian Invasion a Calamity for Tatars but a Recruitment Windfall for Jihadists” (March 2014)

“Donetsk Putsch Nipped in Bud, but Could Odessa or Kharkiv Be Next as Russia Eyes Ukrainian Mainland?” (March 2014)

“Second Crimean War Update: Western Credibility, Russian Lies, and Putin’s Next Steps (Hint: ‘Donetsk Republic’)” (March 2014)

“Ukraine Loses Grip on Crimea, Prepares for Open War with Russia; Role of Far Right in New Kiev Regime Unclear” (Feb. 2014)

“Putin and Ukraine’s Ultranationalist Russians Light the Fuse: Second Crimean War Begins” (Feb. 2014)

“Games Begin! Ukrainian Hijacking, Putin Rounds Up Dissidents” (Feb. 2014)

“Yet Another Genocide Olympics: 10 Political Causes Sure to Disrupt the Sochi Games” (Feb. 2014)

“Minuscule Gagauzia Votes 99% to Declare Independence If Moldova Attempts Romanian Reunification” (Feb. 2014)

“Partition Lines in Ukraine Sharpen as Crimean Russians Call for Separate ‘Malorossiya’” (Jan. 2014)

“Will Ukraine Crisis Become Second Crimean War? Tatars and Russian Nationalists Take Sides” (Jan. 2014)

“Is Ossetian Reunification Just Russian Irredentism by Another Name?” (Jan. 2014)

“10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2014” (Dec. 2013)

“Abkhazia & South Ossetia Won’t Compete in Sochi Olympics, I.O.C. Declares” (Oct. 2013)

“‘Separatism’ Added to List of Things Russians Aren’t Allowed to Talk about” (Sept. 2013)

“She Recognizes Me, She Recognizes Me Not: Fickle Vanuatu Dumps Abkhazia for Georgia” (March 2013)

“Road Dispute Pushes Town near Moscow to Declare Independence from Russia—but with Dusted-Off Fascist Ukrainian Flags, Oddly Enough” (Oct. 2012)

“Gagauzia Threatens to Secede from Moldova If Nationalists Push Reunification with Romania” (Sept. 2012)

“That Creepy Underground Islamic Cult in Tatarstan? Turns Out It’s Just a Split-Level—and the Kids Were Fine” (Aug. 2012)

“The Armenian Genocide Debate: Turkey, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Politics of Memory” (April 2012)

“Language Referendum Pits Latvians against Russians” (Feb. 2012)

“South Ossetia Update: ‘Independent’ Elections in an ‘Independent’ State—Russian Style” (Dec. 2011)

“Transnistria’s Limbo to Continue Indefinitely” (Nov. 2011)