A Socialist In Canada, May 19, 2022
Hello editors of FAIR.org,
I read in your published article by Luca GoldMansour on May 18 that “Russia illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula and supported a secession movement in the eastern Donbass region” [in 2014]. Perhaps your editor(s) was asleep at the wheel when he or she read this utterly false and inaccurate sentence and moved on approvingly. He or she will benefit by reading the following corrections to the historical falsehoods in the cited sentence in your article.
The duly elected government of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (the only such autonomous authority within the Ukraine of the day) staged a democratic referendum on March 16, 2014 to secede from the new, right-wing Ukraine referendum and rejoin the Russian Federation (Wikipedia).
Subsequent polling of the people of Crimea has consistently shown high levels of approval of the 2014 decision. That high level of support has been confirmed among people of Russian descent (app. 68 per cent of the population) as well as those of Ukrainian descent (16 per cent) and Crimean Tatar descent (13 per cent). source
Perhaps your writer is unaware that Crimea was annexed to Ukraine in 1954 by the government of the Soviet Union of the day with precious little popular consultation and approval. The 2014 vote in Crimea was intended, partly, to redress that historic error. But more importantly, the vote was prompted by the threats of the new, coup authorities in Kyiv and their paramilitary, neo-Nazi ‘battalions’ to drown in blood the opposition in Crimea to the illegal coup in Kyiv on February 20-21, 2014. Crimea has voted strongly in favour of the overthrown president Victor Yanukovitch in Ukraine’s presidential election of 2010.
Meanwhile, the so-called ‘secessionists’ in the then-Ukrainian oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk (the historic industrial region of Donbass) demanded political autonomy within Ukraine following the 2014 coup. This eminently democratic measure envisioned a constitutional division of powers between a central government and regional (state or provincial) governments, similar to the constitutional setups in the United States and Canada. ‘Autonomy’ for Donbass was encapsulated in the ‘Minsk 2’ peace agreement of February 2015, which was quickly and unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council on February 17.
But instead of implementing Minsk 2, the new coup regime in Kyiv responded with the worst imaginable violence and bloodshed against the people of Donbass, spearheaded by the regime’s neo-Nazi paramilitary units. Talks to implement Minsk 2 were sabotaged by Kyiv, with the encouragement of the NATO powers, including the three permanent members of the UN Security Council–the U.S., Britain and France–that hypocritically voted to endorse Minsk 2 (on February 17, 2014).
I look forward to your forthcoming articles about the nefarious efforts of the Palestinian people to ‘annex’ territory for a homeland. And not forgetting those shifty Irish people who have never forgotten Britain’s illegal seizure of their territory in the north and have designs to ‘reannex’ Northern Ireland (using that most foul of tactics, as in Crimea in 2014: a democratic referendum).
Don’t forget to keep us informed about the First Nations ‘secessionists’ in Canada and the U.S. who dream of ‘annexing’ territory in their ‘illegal’ efforts (defined by whom?) to assert political self-determination and correct real (not imagined) historical injustices.
Sincerely,
Roger Annis, editor
A Socialist In Canada
