The Vineyard of the Saker: How the US dream of world supremacy was buried in Crimea

These are official results from the referendum in Crimea:

96.77% voted for Crimea to join Russia

02.51% voted for Crimea to remain a sovereign autonomous republic inside the Ukraine

00.72% of the votes were declared invalid

83.10% of the eligible voters participated in this referendum (thus:16.9% did not vote)

As a reminder, this is the official ethnic makeup of Crimea (in 2001):

58.32% Russians

24.32% Ukrainians

12.10% Crimean Tatars

Okay, so what does this mean?

First and foremost, the participation was massive and the 'yes' to Russia won by a landslide.

Second, this was not a vote along ethnic lines.  When we say that are 58.32% Russians in Crimea that does not mean that all of these are eligible voters as children are not allowed to vote.  So the real figure of eligible Russian voters in Crimea is probably well under 50%.  And yet the results show that 96.77% of the eligible voters voted to join Russia.  Where did the rest of the 43.77% (more or less) come from?  It had to be from Ukrainian and Tatar voters.  Even if we assume that 100% of the Russians in Crimea were eligible voters and that they all showed up to vote and all of them voted for the 'yes' to Russia, it still leaves 35.45% of the 'yes' vote to non-Russians.  Even 100% of the Ukrainians does not fill the gap.  In other words, the so-called "Tatar boycott" of this referendum is a complete fabrication of the western media.

Now, this begs the question: why would the Crimean Tatars, who were brutally repressed and massively deported under Stalin and many of whom were seen screaming Allahu Akbar! in clashes with pro-Russian demonstrators suddenly decide to vote for Russia?  Did they suddenly change their minds?  Did the "Polite Armed Green Men" come to their houses and force them to vote at gunpoint?  Of course not.  The explanation is much simpler: in 22 years of independence the Ukraine did exactly nothing to help the Crimean Tatar people, language or culture, nevermind compensating them for their suffering.  In contrast, Russia passed a law called "Law on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples"(here in Russian; here in a Bing machine translation) as early as 1991 which basically solves the problem for the Crimean Tatars who will get what they have always hoped for right along their brand new Russian passports.  Yes, of course, there are some Crimean-Tatars who would have preferred to remain under Ukrainian sovereignty because they believe that Russians are inherently capable of repeating the actions of Stalin at any time and that Russian nationalism is a threat to them.  I don't mean to suggest that they are smart - only that some of them do really believe that.  Some Muslim radicals want to either be part of Turkey or create their own Islamic state.  Fair enough - but they are a minority within a minority and thus, frankly, quite irrelevant.  The reality is that this entire "Crimean Tatar issue" is a canard cooked up in the West in the desperate hope to find some kind of "ethnic/religious fulcrum" to deny the legitimacy of this referendum and stir up more ethnic trouble.  The results show that this plan clearly failed.

So what is going to happen next?

   

The Vineyard of the Saker: How the US dream of world supremacy was buried in Crimea