Ukraine: Fascist coup or Russian invasion?

Crimea will soon “return home to Russia,” said Nikolai Filippov in the Simferopol Krymskaya Pravda. “Reflecting the sentiments and aspirations of their constituents,” Crimean lawmakers last week voted to rejoin Russia, 60 years after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred the territory to Ukraine. The parliament has now scheduled a referendum for March 16 that will allow the Crimean people to confirm the decision and “start the process of joining Russia as a subject of the Russian Federation.” The choice is an easy one, given that the current authority in Kiev is an unelected government with fascist leanings that deposed the democratically elected leadership two weeks ago. As Crimean parliament speaker Vladimir Konstantinov said in announcing the referendum, Crimeans do not want to “negotiate with the cowardly, illegitimate powers in Kiev and cravenly beg their protection.” The coup was unlawful. The vote next week, though, will be “unambiguous and in accordance with international law.”

The charge of fascism is a red herring, said Dmitry Shusharin in the Kiev Den. The Russian invaders have invented a fantasy that the thousands of pro-democracy protesters who rallied in Kiev’s main square were mostly neo-Nazis. In reality, it’s Russian President Vladimir Putin who is following a “Hitler scenario,” ready to send in the troops on a trumped-up pretext of protecting his own ethnic group. He is not treating Ukraine as a sovereign state. Indeed, he has “barely concealed contempt for the institution of the state,” preferring not to govern in a suit and tie but to rule as a bare-chested autocrat. Meanwhile, just as craven Western leaders of the past refused to acknowledge the crimes of Hitler and Stalin—the Ukrainian famine, the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulag—“the current generation of Western leaders” has chosen to ignore Putin’s malevolence.

It is up to Ukrainians to preserve our unity, said Maksim Kolomys in the Kiev Ukrainska Pravda. “If ‘East and West still together’ is to be more than just a slogan,” we will have to decide how much we are willing to pay for unity. The acting authorities in Kiev overreached last month when, right after voting to remove President Viktor Yanukovych, they passed an “odious law” that forbade the use of Russian. That was understandably seen as a slap at our Russian-speaking brethren in the east of the country. “Our maturity as a nation will depend on our ability to clasp hands with our opponents.” There is much that separates Kiev and the Crimean capital of Simferopol, “yet surely what we have in common is much more.”

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Ukrainian patriotism is still alive in Crimea, said Maria Vasilye in the Kiev Fakty i Kommentarii. When armed Russian troops surrounded unarmed Ukrainian soldiers at a Crimean air base, they were able to conquer it easily. But “what struck me” was that the Ukrainian soldiers, without saying a word, “began to sing the national anthem, ‘Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished.’”