Fresh off the theft of Crimea, the autocrats in Moscow took a victory lap this week to boast in pageantry and ceremonial flag-raisings seemingly designed to insult Ukraine’s honor and dignity.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev flaunted the Kremlin’s takeover of the Black Sea peninsula by visiting Simferopol on March 31, where he promised to pour billions of dollars into the region and create a special economic zone to stimulate investment.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin rubbed salt in Ukraine’s wounds by posting a photo on Twitter of him standing on the seaside shortly after his arrival in Ukraine’s Crimea with the words “Crimea is ours and that’s that.”
The brazen and illegal takeover, unless reversed, is upsetting the world order and threatens to trigger a permanent rupture with Russia between the West and the rest of Ukraine, especially as Russian soldiers threaten from across the border and Russia issues demands for “federalization” of Ukraine – what many in Ukraine believe is the Kremlin’s code word for dismemberment of the Ukrainian nation.
Here’s a look back at the two-step, three-week process executing the land grab of the century and the war crimes and illegal acts committed in the process:
Step 1: Government takeover at gunpoint
The seizure began at dawn on Feb. 27, when some 100 armed men in military uniform stormed the Crimean parliament and Council of Ministers buildings in Simferopol. Wielding automatic rifles, the masked captors muscled the government security guards and refused to negotiate with then-prime minister Anatoly Mohyliov. Once in control, they allowed into parliament only a handful of Russian journalists along with a cadre of loyal lawmakers who voted swiftly to hold a referendum on the status of Crimea’s autonomy. By nightfall, this rump parliament, with 53 votes according to the Kremlin, chose Sergey Aksyonov as the new Crimean prime minister.
Those reports contrast starkly with the account of Crimean lawmaker Nikolay Sumulidy and his colleagues. Sumulidy said there were no more than 37 lawmakers present during the momentous votes, three short of a quorum, making the whole charade illegitimate from the start. Most Crimean officials and citizens stayed silent out of fear and the threat of violent retaliation.
Step 2: Invade with Russian soldiers, deny their presence; use women, children as human shields
Hours after the votes, armored vehicles believed to be from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet base transported soldiers to strategic targets around the peninsula. Mark Galeotti, a New York University professor and Russian security services expert, called it “an act of war.” Russia began trampling the United Nations Charter and 1975 Helsinki Final Act to respect Ukraine’s sovereign rights and to refrain from the threat or use of force, and its agreement under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to guarantee Ukraine’s security and territorial integrity, as well as the 1997 Black Sea basing agreement of troop size and movements.
In early March, Crimea teemed with thousands of heavily armed soldiers in unmarked uniforms who moved quickly to surround and then capture Ukrainian military bases and other buildings of importance, using women and children as human shields during the storming of many complexes, in blatant violation of Geneva conventions on acceptable warfare.
The soldiers had Russian guns, wore fatigues similar to those known to be worn by Russian soldiers and spoke with distinctive Russian accents. Some of them even admitted to being Russian soldiers. And still, Putin denied during a news conference on March 4 – and on several other occasions – that they were under orders of Moscow, calling the militants “local self-defense forces.”
Crimean residents began calling the soldiers “the little green men” although they knew their identities. It was only on March 16, the day of the bogus referendum on secession, that Crimea’s Vice Premier Rustam Temirgaliyev admitted the presence of Russian soldiers.
“Yes, we have Russian troops in Crimea, but they are absolutely legal,” he said. In the next days many of the soldiers removed their masks, became more talkative and displayed their Russian identification, including the country’s flag, on their uniforms.
Ukraine unprepared
Given the swift execution of the Russian operation, experts believe the seizure was long in the making, unbeknownst to the Ukrainian side.
“All, including heads of (Ukrainian) military headquarters, chiefs of military intelligence, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were not thinking about possible aggression from Russia,” said Valeriy Chaly, deputy head of the Razumkov Center think tank in Kyiv.
Kyiv’s officials were distracted by the successful EuroMaidan Revolution and preoccupied with setting up a new government to replace the administration of overthrown President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22
Some, however, said the Russian takeover was flagged in advance, but nobody in Ukraine did anything to stop it.
Svitlana Savchenko, Crimean parliamentarian, told the Kyiv Post that the Alfa special unit of Ukrainian police officers summoned the speaker of the region’s parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, to the Interior Ministry office in Simferopol on Feb. 26. Konstantinov, however, did not go. Sergiy Kunitsyn, who was nominated on Feb. 27 as interim President Oleksandr Turchynov’s representative in Crimea, said the Alfa unit had the capability to stop the assault, but did not intervene.
On March 24, after Russian troops had flooded the peninsula, Kunitsyn resigned in protest of the inaction from the government in Kyiv. “Every day they (Kyiv authorities) mock our soldiers, and we just convene some meetings,” he said.
Here again, Crimean representatives of Yanukovych’s pro-government Party of Regions may have laid the groundwork for the successful takeover.
For years, the Yanukovych loyalists used pro-Russian and post-Soviet propaganda to suppress independent media and emphasize the differences between Crimea and mainland Ukraine. So, anti-EuroMaidan Revolution sentiment on the peninsula ran high.
“They prepared the basis for this” Russian takeover, said Sergiy Mokrushin, a Simferopol-based investigative journalist, referring to loyalists of the disgraced Yanukovych. “They tried to gain a foothold here but instead opened the way for militiamen and Russia.”
Russia-backed forces employ violence, torture
Along with Russian troops, thousands of Kremlin-backed paramilitary groups began operating on the peninsula to silence opposition to the Kremlin takeover through kidnappings, threats and assaults of Ukrainian activists and journalists.
On March 9, seven people were kidnapped in Crimea by pro-Russian militiamen. Two activists from the local EuroMaidan Revolution movement, Anatoliy Kovalsky and Andriy Shchekun, were abducted at the train station in Simferopol, where they had come to pick up a parcel from Kyiv. Five more people, including AutoMaidan activists Shura Riazantseva and Katheryna Butko, as well as Kyiv journalist Olena Maksymenko, photographer Oles Kromplias and driver Yevhen Rakhno, were captured when they tried to cross into Crimea by car from Kherson Oblast. All were released, but many said they tortured in captivity.
Torture is war crime
“They made me pull the laces out of sneakers, and one of the men started strangling me with the laces. They hit me with their fists to my cheekbone, cut part of my hair. They said they would kill my friends in front of me and cut their heads off. They threatened to cut my ear off,” Olena Maksymenko said at a news conference.
On March 17, Reshat Ametov, a Crimean Tatar activist, was found dead with signs of torture in a village some 60 kilometers from Simferopol. Ametov had been missing since March 3, when uniformed Russian-backed armed men and Crimean self-defense forces abducted him at a Simferopol meeting in support of the EuroMaidan Revolution, his relatives said. “He was just standing there and they took him away,” Ametov’s mother, Refika Ametova, told the Kyiv Post at his funeral on March 18.
On March 19, Russian soldiers kidnapped Ukrainian fleet commander Admiral Serhiy Haiduk from his headquarters in Sevastopol. Haiduk was released the next day after Kyiv threatened to cut off the water and electricity to Crimea, which relies heavily on the mainland for the utilities. But even after Haiduk, dozens more Ukrainian soldiers were abducted.
Ukrainian Air Force Col. Yuliy Mamchur was one of them. He was subjected to psychological pressure while being held captive. “They kept me 3.5 days in solitary cell room… tried to persuade me to betray my military oath to (serve) the Ukrainian people and defect to service in the Russian army,” he said on March 26 after being released.
Today, not even the conquering Putin denies the presence of Russian military forces. He is honoring them as heroes and decorating them with medals.
“The recent events in Crimea were a serious test, which demonstrated both the completely new capabilities of our Armed Forces and the high morale of the personnel,” Putin said. He praised the troops for “avoiding bloodshed” in Crimea, not mentioning the two deaths – that of a Ukrainian officer and a pro-Russian self-defense member – who were shot and killed during a Russian siege on a Ukrainian base in March.
Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller and staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].
