Press TV – March 1, 2014
People in the port city of Sevastopol in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea have been voicing support for the notion of Crimea joining Russia, a report says.
“In Sevastopol, where Russia’s Black Sea fleet has a base, residents speak unabashedly of wanting Crimea to return to Russia,” reads a report by Reuters on February 28, referring to the fact that the now autonomous Crimea was once part of the former Soviet Union.
“Crowds rally daily in front of city hall, and voted with roars of approval this week for Russian citizen, Alexei Chaliy, as their de facto mayor, chanting: ‘A Russian mayor for a Russian town.’”
Crimea, an autonomous region within Ukraine, has been the focal point of concern ever since Ukrainian politics became chaotic. Ukraine has been experiencing unrest since November 2013, when now-ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych refrained from signing an Association Agreement with the EU in favor of closer ties with Russia.
The Ukrainian parliament ousted Yanukovych and named Oleksandr Turchynov, the legislature’s speaker, as interim president on February 23.
When Russia confirmed on Friday that it had moved its troops already based in Ukraine’s Crimea region to protect its naval fleet, a move Moscow said was in compliance with Russian-Ukrainian agreements, it was met with warnings from Ukraine’s new authorities as well as Western officials, who warned against “provocations” on the Crimean peninsula, where the Autonomous Republic of Crimea is also located.
As the crisis was brewing in Ukraine, US and European officials repeatedly expressed support for the anti-government Ukrainian protesters. The protests took violent forms as an increasing number of the protesters resorted to violence in confronting Ukrainian security forces.
The Reuters report said that while the anti-government protesters who “brought down” the Yanukovych administration in Ukraine are “heroes in the capital (Kiev) and the West,” in Crimea, “they are compared to the nationalist militias sometimes accused of siding with Nazi troops against Soviet forces during World War Two.”
The report quoted a resident of Sevastopol as saying, “Crimea has historically never belonged to Ukraine. We want historical justice. This is an exclusively Russian city. It was and will remain so.”
Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov recently claimed that Russian troops, backed by armored personnel carriers, entered the Belbek airfield near Sevastopol. Russia’s Interfax news agency, however, quoted an unnamed source as saying that the country’s Black Sea Fleet forces did not seize the airfield or take any other action there.
Referring to the calls by the people of Crimea for the autonomous region to join Russia, the Reuters report said that, “Moscow has not responded directly to calls… but a number of Russian lawmakers have visited Crimea, and are given a hero’s welcome.”