Crimea has right to self-determination
20 March 2014 3:56 AM IST
After the Crimean referendum, overwhelmingly in favour of joining the Russian Federation, and in the wake of treaties being signed to welcome Crimea as an autonomous state of Putinland, world politics has indeed taken a brand new turn. Inasmuch as a referendum is much like putting a legal stamp on something that is bubbling in the public sphere, such as recognising a popular secession and acknowledging the new arrangement through the ballot box, Crimea has spoken. Its longstanding ties with Russia have outweighed strategic considerations that Ukraine had been placing on the balance, chiefly the prospect of dalliances with European Union and enjoying economic fruits of access to Eurozone. In addition, Kiev sees a breakaway from Moscow as passport to a supposedly more affluent, Westernised lifestyle, which, for ethnic Ukrainians also signifies a political and cultural emergence from Russian shadow. However, the question of Crimea is an entirely different game of chess, given that the region was ‘leased’ to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 as a goodwill gesture, and which has now, with Crimean people’s nod, been returned to Russia. Effectively, this translates as Moscow having its say and sway on Crimea and the geostrategically significant Black Sea bed, much to the consternation of the new pro-Western regime in Kiev and its Euro-American masters. Clearly, fortress America is flustered because it has been completely stumped in its own game, which is to force a double-whammy of economic sanctions and military surgical operation in the name of humanitarian intervention and effect ‘regime change’ as a toast to democracy.
But democracy has been upheld. Even as staunch Putin critics such as Garry Kasparov have branded the referendum staged and at gun point, it is true that Crimeans have sided with Moscow, much to the chagrin of anti-Putin political lobbies in Russia, whose differences with the savvy president over domestic squabbles have evidently blinded them to larger international anxieties that are at stake. Financialisation and militarisation have been the twin tools through which naked American hegemony has been served for decades now, and has turned particularly virulent since the fall of Soviet Union. However, with China and now Russia putting up strong resistance to the expansive regime of normalised market penetration and capture of precious natural resources as practiced by America and its European lackeys, new equations can be found. That Russia has been ‘dropped’ from G8 as a countermeasure to its ‘annexation’ of Crimea – or what the West would like the world to believe, the referendum notwithstanding – is indication that America is truly dazed and confused after being so thoroughly beaten. Regime-changers in Kiev can now twiddle their thumb and mull the definitive fallouts of severing ties with Russia, the most prominent of which is going to be an energy famine in the imminent future.
But democracy has been upheld. Even as staunch Putin critics such as Garry Kasparov have branded the referendum staged and at gun point, it is true that Crimeans have sided with Moscow, much to the chagrin of anti-Putin political lobbies in Russia, whose differences with the savvy president over domestic squabbles have evidently blinded them to larger international anxieties that are at stake. Financialisation and militarisation have been the twin tools through which naked American hegemony has been served for decades now, and has turned particularly virulent since the fall of Soviet Union. However, with China and now Russia putting up strong resistance to the expansive regime of normalised market penetration and capture of precious natural resources as practiced by America and its European lackeys, new equations can be found. That Russia has been ‘dropped’ from G8 as a countermeasure to its ‘annexation’ of Crimea – or what the West would like the world to believe, the referendum notwithstanding – is indication that America is truly dazed and confused after being so thoroughly beaten. Regime-changers in Kiev can now twiddle their thumb and mull the definitive fallouts of severing ties with Russia, the most prominent of which is going to be an energy famine in the imminent future.
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