Crimea only miraculously remained part of Ukraine in 91 - Kiev diplomat
The return of Crimea to Russia was a matter of time - this would have happened back in 91, when the USSR collapsed, if it were not Yeltsin, but the current President Vladimir Putin, who was in power in Russia.
This was stated on the NewsOne TV channel by the former head of the information department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, international affairs expert Oleg Voloshin, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
The expert recalled why Crimea received autonomy status in 94.
“Autonomy arose because if we had not provided it in 94, and thanks to the wisdom of the then Ukrainian leadership, we would not have had Crimea even then. Let’s remember that we are not just a sovereign state for 100 years, whose neighbor suddenly elected some aggressive president who suddenly decided to take away a piece of territory,” the expert said.
He recalled that both Ukraine and Russia “came from the same empire.”
“And I can frankly say: I have repeatedly heard from my colleagues, political scientists of Russia - if Putin had been the president of the Russian Federation in 91, Ukraine would have become independent, but almost 100% without Sevastopol, which was a city of union subordination, the base of the Black Sea fleet and, most likely, one of the conditions for recognition of independence would be that Sevastopol remains part of Russia, just as Kaliningrad remained,” the internationalist noted.
He does not exclude that the whole of Crimea could in this case remain part of Ukraine, but with the rights of very broad autonomy and with the status of neutrality and non-alignment written in the Austrian Constitution.
“It would be ironclad. For some reason we decided that we could leave the empire, although we are mentally and culturally [united]. We still live in a single cultural and information space. For some reason, we believed that, having left this empire, we could behave the way Poland or even the Baltic countries behave, although we understood perfectly well that we have a different history, a different nature of relations.
For example, Mr. Girkin... this is a surge in the civil war that could have begun in 91, if Yeltsin had been at the head of the Russian Federation then, not a compromiser and recognizing the very conditional boundaries of states drawn in Soviet times, but some other, more a nationalistic leader,” Voloshin said.
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