Word: crimean
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Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk tried to slow the movement, warning that "there can be no guarantee that events in the Crimea will not lurch out of control and that human blood will not be spilled." But the Crimean parliament ignored him and last month passed a resolution calling for a referendum on independence. The response from Kiev was swift: the Ukrainian parliament declared the Crimean resolution unconstitutional, and government officials hinted that the Crimean legislature might be dissolved and direct rule from Kiev imposed...
Under pressure, Crimean leaders backed down and rescinded the resolution, & but not before Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, the Kremlin's standard-bearer for increasingly influential Russian nationalists, blasted Ukrainian politicians for portraying Russia as "an insidious empire" and trying to break up the Commonwealth. "The referendum in Crimea must be held, and no one can ban it with force or with threats," Rutskoi insisted in a newspaper article. Two days later, in a closed-door session, the Russian parliament upped the ante by voting to annul the 1954 transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine as "an illegal...
...parliament in Kiev last week rejected the Russian allegations, but the Ukrainians did agree in concert with Crimean leaders to grant the region special economic status. But Kravchuk's government, which depends on support from Ukrainian nationalists in parliament, has flatly defined the Crimean problem as "an internal affair" that does not concern foreign states. "There will never be negotiations," says Vladimir Kryzhanovsky, Ukraine's ambassador to Moscow. To negotiate, he argues, would open a Pandora's box by calling into question all the myriad treaties and border determinations made during 74 years of Soviet rule. "If we negate everything...
...complicated enough, the Tatars, who controlled the Crimea until 1783 when the Turkish Khanate was defeated by Catherine the Great, are staking a claim to their native land. Deported across the eastern Soviet Union en masse in 1944 after Stalin accused them of collaborating with the Nazis, the Crimean Tatars have been returning by the tens of thousands in the past two years. With support from Kiev, which views them as a buffer against the Russian majority, some 200,000 Tatars have started building houses across the peninsula on state-owned land...
...Kiev and Moscow might degenerate into a violent conflict, the West has been pressuring both sides to come to terms peacefully. Russian President Boris Yeltsin recently took a step in that direction, announcing that Moscow had dropped its insistence that the 380-ship Black Sea Fleet, based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, was a "strategic force" that should fall under joint Commonwealth command...