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Crimea’s Complicated Past — Does it Really Belong to Ukraine?
I firmly believe that the Crimean peninsula belongs to Ukraine presently. It definitely doesn’t belong to Russia, despite the amount of ethnic Russians on the peninsula.
But if we were to be technical, Crimea shouldn’t belong to any Slavic nation; instead, it belongs to Crimean Tatars who made up more than 98 percent of the population for centuries.
From Catherine the Great’s occupation to Joseph Stalin’s deportation, Crimean Tatars were slowly replaced by Slavs.
And now they are a minority. But what happened — and why do both Ukrainians and Russians think the peninsula rightfully belongs to them?
Let me propose a thought experiment for you.
Alaska once belonged to Russia. Then they sold it to the United States. Is anyone in their right mind proposing that Alaska rightfully belongs to Russia?
Most of us realize that the US state technically belongs to the tribes and indigenous groups who lived there for thousands of years before empires came in and colonized the territory.
In a similar way, it is fairly disappointing that so few Ukrainian voices I listen to have pointed out Crimea’s troubling past with colonialism. We focus on colonialism so much in the West because of our history — and…
