Former Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk “sees symptoms” that Russia is not coping with Crimea.
He stated this in an interview with the YouTube channel “Current Time,” a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“There is no influx of tourists. Russia keeps saying that maybe it is worth making a military base in Crimea. Crimea turned out to be not so easy. To raise Crimea, you need to invest enormous amounts of money in it. Ukraine has invested $100 billion in it. These are not the billions they are now. Now it’s more than 200. There may come a time when Russia will have no time for Crimea,” Kravchuk said.
He believes that Ukraine will return Crimea when the Kremlin reconsiders its current policies.
“We will not return Crimea by force, this is clear. It is an unacceptable idea to return Crimea by military means. It is necessary to politically, diplomatically and economically lead to such conditions that it would be beneficial for Crimea to live with Ukraine,” Kravchuk said.
At the same time, he emphasizes that Ukraine’s policy towards Crimeans must be “objective and fair.”
“We shouldn’t be tossed from side to side. Either our people live there, or our enemies live there. What happened happened. What happened was wrong, in violation of international law. Ukraine is also to blame for this. If before the war we had more competently conducted an economic, cultural, language policy for Crimea and Russian-speaking regions and given more freedoms to the people living there, they would not have had the same aggression towards the central government,” Kravchuk said.
It is noteworthy that last year Crimea visited by a record number of tourists after 1991.