Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 15—Mustafa Cemilev, the
spiritual leader of the Crimean Tatars, yesterday told Alexander Vershbow, the
deputy secretary general of NATO, that if Moscow launches a war against
Ukraine, that event will mark “the beginning of the end of the Russian
Federation.”
“The situation in Crimea,” he said, “is
an adventure of the Russia state. It will not bring anything good to the
Crimean Tatars or Ukraine, and it will not bring anything good to Russia
either.” Instead, it will “lead to the disintegration” of Russia, something especially
“dangerous” because of Moscow’s nuclear weapons (rus.newsru.ua/ukraine/14mar2014/dzh_voina.html).
Cemilev said
that he had earlier told Russian President Vladimir Putin during a telephone
conversation that “it is absurd to
define the future of Crimea by a referendum in these circumstances,” to which
Putin responded “that all procedures are not always observed” and weren’t in
the case of the disintegration of the USSR in 1991.
At the same time, Cemilev reiterated
his longstanding position that “the Crimean Tatars are citizens of Ukraine.” And
he added that “the violation of the territorial integrity of [that] country
threatens not only Crimea and Ukraine but most of all Russia with dramatic
consequences.”
Cemilev’s words reflect his
understanding, not unfortunately widely shared in many places, that the
disintegration of the Soviet Union occurred not as a result of Mikhail
Gorbachev’s moves toward liberalization but rather when the last Soviet
president, having liberalized, turned to the right and tried to impose tighter
control.
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