The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry moved last week to ban Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov from entering the country as politicians from across the Kyiv political spectrum rushed to condemn Mr. Luzhkov’s claim that a legal case existed for ceding Sevastopol to Russia. Mr. Luzhkov has a long history of provocative comments on the subject of Russian ties to Crimea, but whereas he has previously restricted himself to calling Sevastopol a district of Moscow or speaking of the pain caused to all Russians by the loss of Crimea, on this occasion the bombastic mayor of the Russian capital appeared to be laying down a rudimentary legal framework for renewed territorial claims to Crimea. Speaking at a gathering to mark the 225th anniversary of the foundation of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Mr. Luzhkov suggested that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1954 decree gifting Crimea to Soviet Ukraine was never meant to include Sevastopol, which in Soviet times was a highly secret military city closed to all non-residents. “The issue remains unresolved,” Mr. Luzhkov commented while championing Russian claims to what for centuries had been the country’s fabled southern, warm water port.
An end to eternal Slavic fraternity?
Mr. Luzhkov’s remarks come in the wake of similar recent statements in Russia’s state Duma over the need to reassess the terms and conditions of Russia’s 1997 friendship treaty with Ukraine, raising speculation that Russia will seek to revive its Crimean claims as part of a general response to Ukraine’s NATO aspirations. The Kremlin has reacted with thinly concealed fury to recent Ukrainian overtures to the military alliance, with Russian Foreign Minister Mr. Lavrov stating that Russian was ready to ‘take all steps” to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and Mr. Putin accused of threatening to begin the process of absorbing south-eastern Ukraine and Crimea into the Russian Federation.
Russian officials reacted to last week’s news that Mr. Luzhkov had been banned from Ukraine with public dismay and protestations of innocence, branding the move an unfriendly act by Ukraine’s authorities. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesmen summed up the current jingoistic mood in Moscow in a statement defending the mayor’s comments which highlighted the increasing readiness of the Kremlin to adopt a more assertive stance throughout the lost colonies of the former Soviet empire. “Yury Luzhkov only expressed an opinion that conformsto the viewpoint oftthe majority of Russians, who have watched the breakup of the Soviet Union with pain,” ministry officials offered in response to the fury over the Moscow mayor’s comments.
In what appeared to be a tit for tat retaliation Russian border guards last week reacted to news of Luzhkov’s Ukraine ban by preventing Ukrainian politician Vladislav Kaskiv from entering Russia. Officials reportedly detained Kaskiv, who heads the Pora faction in parliament and rose to fame as the co-ordinator of the tent city during the 2004 Orange Revolution, as he arrived at a Moscow airport. Kaskiv had been due to appear on a Russian TV debate show dealing with the issue of Crimea, where he would have been pitted against arch-Ukrainophobe and Russian Duma vice-speaker Vladimir Zhirinovski.
Crimean pot threatening to boil
Crimea has long been widely viewed as a potential time bomb of ethnic and post-imperial unrest, with the threat of potential confrontation heightened in recent years as Ukraine seeks to assert its independence. The peninsula continues to have a majority ethnic Russian population, many of whom trace their roots back to some of the most celebrated events in Russian history and pine for the days of empire while bristling under Kyiv’s rule. On the eve of the annual May 9 Victory Day celebrations Russian community groups in the autonomous region launched a campaign dubbed “A Russian Flag in Every Window,” which saw thousands of Russian flags handed out to Crimeans in a public display of defiance to what many ethnic Russians regard as attempts to implement a policy of Ukrainianisation.
Even today many Russians continue to regard Khrushchev’s 1954 decision to attach the peninsula to Soviet Ukraine as little more than an accident of history and as a result of such prevailing attitudes the peninsula has a long history of pro-Russian agitation. Ukraine’s recent push for a NATO membership plan has led to a sharp deterioration in the two countries’ already frayed bilateral relations, highlighting the increasingly diverging paths the former Soviet republics have taken in recent years. Direct confrontation has become more common ever since the November 2004 Orange Revolution, with Ukraine’s efforts to gradually move out of the Kremlin’s orbit producing a bellicose Russian response. Even before the breach of 2004 the two countries had clashed over a number of issues including the long-term lease of Sevastopol naval base to the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the exact location of their territorial border in eastern Crimea’s Kerch Strait. This simmering tension has been ratcheted up over the past eighteen years by the presence of increasing numbers of Crimean Tatar returnees who have flocked to their ancestral homeland from exile in central Asian in their tens of thousands since the Ukrainian authorities lifted restrictions in the first years of independence. The powder keg in this potentially explosive mix is the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, which remains the home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and a bastion of Russian nationalist sentiment. As Ukraine edges closer to NATO and seeks to assert its regional clout, the future fate of the Russian fleet at Sevastopol will be at the centre of any political showdowns. The present agreement between the two countries will see the Russian Black Sea fleet remain in Sevastopol until 2017.
An unlikely blockbuster
Meanwhile, officials at Ukraine’s Defence Ministry announced plans last week to help finance a USD 20 million blockbuster movie about the Crimean war which will focus on the role of Ukrainians in the defence of Sevastopol during the mid-nineteenth century conflict between imperial Russia and an alliance of Ottoman Turkey, France and Britain. Over the past century and a half the siege of Sevastopol has taken on almost mythical proportions in the annals of Russian history, making the port a particularly emotive theme for Russians, many of whom will no doubt view any attempt to portray the conflict from an exclusively Ukrainian perspective as a direct affront and the latest salvo in a bitter separation.
The production of a feature film focusing attention on Ukraine’s historical role during the siege of Sevastopol would mark the latest escalation in the memory wars now being fought out between the Putin regime and Ukraine’s Orange politicians. In recent years the Ukrainian government has become more assertive in its attempts to reclaim elements of Ukrainian history from the censorship of the past, reinterpreting events from a Ukrainian standpoint and placing the country on a collision course with official Russian policy which seeks to soften criticism of the Soviet past as it lurches back into one-party rule. Russian politicians have repeatedly accused Kyiv of seeking to rewrite Ukrainian history, a charge which Ukrainians have responded to by pointing out the need to address the whitewashes and russified interpretations enforced by previous regimes. However, while controversial figures such as Hetman Mazepa and the leaders of the WWII Ukrainian Insurgent Army have been rehabilitated and recognised as national heroes in recent years, no attempt has yet been made to emphasise Ukraine’s historic ties to Crimea.
Russia itself has seen a slew of state-backed historical movies, with favourite episodes in Soviet and Russian imperial history revisited to build on the country’s resurgent sense of national pride following a decade of post-Soviet humiliation. The nineteenth century siege of Sevastopol and the Crimean War in general have not featured heavily in this cinematic trend towards patriotic movies, but the Black Sea port did memorably feature in Brat-2, one of the hit Russian movies of the 1990s. At one point in the film the hero finds himself in a gun fight with a Ukrainian gangster in a Chicago disco. After wounding the Ukrainian, he applies a lethal head shot before adding, “and that’s for Sevastopol!”
