How Bad Might It Get In Ukraine?

by Jonah Shepp

Very bad, says Paul Hockenos, who compares the situation today to the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s:

[A]nyone who followed the unfolding of the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Kosovo is surely horrified today by the dynamics between Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainian leadership, the people of Crimea, and citizens in the rest of Ukraine. The similarities to the Balkans of the 1990s are, in many ways, striking: Just as Serbia and Croatia cynically exploited the presence of their compatriots outside the borders of their republics, so too is Putin manipulating the welfare of the Russophone Crimeans as justification for cross-border military operations, the seizure of territory, and a phoney referendum. As in the Balkans, the media has been turned into the mouthpiece of extreme nationalists. Once again, there’s inadequate security architecture to defuse tensions; and then there’s the radicalization of nationalism which, when fanned so fiercely, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and, in the Balkans, led to Europe’s worst bloodshed since World War II.

Alexander Motyl fears ethnic strife in Crimea:

Unsurprisingly, Ukrainians are terrified by Putin’s warmongering. A friend in Lviv, which is as far as one can be from Ukraine’s eastern border (or is it front?) with Russia, tells me that “people are petrified and believe war is inevitable.” So are Crimean Tatars, whose ancestral land has already been occupied by Putin’s troops and who remember Stalin’s genocidal policies in 1944, when the entire Tatar population was deported to Central Asia and half died.

What if Crimean Tatars, who have already begun forming self-defense units (and some of whom have begun talking of an anti-Russian jihad), take to the streets after Putin wrests Crimea from Ukraine? How will Putin respond? His warmongering statements suggest that mass internments of Crimean Tatars in concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide are no longer inconceivable.

Oleg Shynkarenko expects a mass exodus from the region:

In the run-up to the vote, Russian media has been churning out non-stop propaganda about how thousands of Ukrainians are fleeing into Russia proper to escape neo-Nazis and fascists. But the reality is that many Crimeans are fleeing north to other regions of Ukraine, to escape the local militias manned by Russian separatists. This weekend, as reports surfaced of Russian armed forces landing in Kherson, the escape to safety seemed even more pressing for the region’s pro-Kiev activists and ethnic minority Tatars. …

Taras Beresovets is a political analyst of Crimea origin. He is sure that Ukraine is now witnessing the beginning of a long process of annexation and flight. He predicts that after the March 16 referendum, the suppression of dissidents and even ethnic cleansing could become more common. “At least 100,000 people will leave Crimea then”, Beresovets said.