Word: crimea
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...unimaginable has since come to pass, and now the Crimea is at the center of a bitter territorial row between Russia and Ukraine that threatens to destroy the fragile Commonwealth of Independent States and make enemies out of two nuclear-armed nations. In the Crimean capital of Simferopol, ethnic Russians gather daily outside the local parliament building to accuse Ukrainian leaders of disregard for their right to self-determination. In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, 400 miles away, thousands have converged in recent weeks to protest Moscow's "imperialist" designs on the Crimea, which is part of Ukraine...
...revolves around an ironic tribute to the two states' shared history. In 1954 Nikita Khrushchev transferred the region from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Republic as a "gift" commemorating 300 years of Russian-Ukrainian unity. But the transfer was largely symbolic. Moscow's writ still ran in the Crimea, just as it did in the time of the Czars. Since last year, however, when Kiev started agitating for independence, Russians in Crimea launched a movement to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia...
Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk tried to slow the movement, warning that "there can be no guarantee that events in the Crimea will not lurch out of control and that human blood will not be spilled." But the Crimean parliament ignored him and last month passed a resolution calling for a referendum on independence. The response from Kiev was swift: the Ukrainian parliament declared the Crimean resolution unconstitutional, and government officials hinted that the Crimean legislature might be dissolved and direct rule from Kiev imposed...
Under pressure, Crimean leaders backed down and rescinded the resolution, & but not before Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, the Kremlin's standard-bearer for increasingly influential Russian nationalists, blasted Ukrainian politicians for portraying Russia as "an insidious empire" and trying to break up the Commonwealth. "The referendum in Crimea must be held, and no one can ban it with force or with threats," Rutskoi insisted in a newspaper article. Two days later, in a closed-door session, the Russian parliament upped the ante by voting to annul the 1954 transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine as "an illegal...
...issue weren't complicated enough, the Tatars, who controlled the Crimea until 1783 when the Turkish Khanate was defeated by Catherine the Great, are staking a claim to their native land. Deported across the eastern Soviet Union en masse in 1944 after Stalin accused them of collaborating with the Nazis, the Crimean Tatars have been returning by the tens of thousands in the past two years. With support from Kiev, which views them as a buffer against the Russian majority, some 200,000 Tatars have started building houses across the peninsula on state-owned land...