Since I left university I haven't really been keeping as up to date with current affairs as perhaps I should have been, but this week some pretty serious stuff has been going down in Crimea and it really caught my attention. My initail reaction from watching the news was shock that Russia would invade another territory without legitimate reason - nothing I was seeing was indicating that Russia had invaded for any other reason than the fact that Ukraine is in a vulnerable position right now.
I was doing some reading on this this evening though and I stumbled upon this article. It's not often that I read something that makes me shift my opinion to such a large extent anymore, but in this case I think that there is a genuine argument to be made in Russia's favour.
58.8% of the Crimean peninsula are of Russian ethnicity compared just 24.4% who are Ukrainian. On top of this, the interim (yeah right) government in Kiev is being led by two of the country's most prominent far-right extremists, who have already repealed a law (which was only passed last year) that recognized Russian as an official state language.
While I don't necessarily agree with the way in which Putin has gone about handling this, I do think that he has a legitimate reason to be concerned for the safety/human rights of ethnic Russians in Crimea; surely part of his job as President is to protect Russians from foreign threats?
I'm guessing that some of you will try and argue that Putin has never cared about human rights before, and this is just an excuse he is using to reclaim territory lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and to a certain extent, this is probably true. But if the same type of situation arose elsewhere in the world and American/British people were threatened, I have no doubt that the US/UK governments would take swift action (lets reflect for a moment on the UK's response to Argentinian threats over the Falklands).
It seems to me that much of what is explained in this argument has been conveniently overlooked in the Western press and the Western response to this crisis. It's been over twenty years since the Cold War ended, but it still seems as if we haven't quite managed to shake the attitude we had towards the USSR during this period.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that it's very easy to condemn Putin when you only have half the story. While the the interim government in Ukraine hasn't actively attacked Russians in Crimea, I do think that there is a case to be made in Russia's favour. I'm not excusing Putin's response to the situation, and he was definitely wrong to deploy troops without first exhausting diplomatic mediation channels, but we should always try and remember that there are two sides to every story.
P.S. I am so sorry for the terrible pun in the title, but I just couldn't help myself.
