Reuters reports: Gently bobbing up and down in the sheltered waters of the Bay of Sevastopol in Crimea, Russia’s storied Black Sea Fleet has an air of decay about it.

Paint peels from low-slung dockside buildings, a solitary submarine sits dolefully alongside a pontoon, and the fleet’s boxy grey ships date back to the Soviet-era with many soon destined for the scrap heap.

But appearances can be deceptive. The fleet, its base, and the sprawling military infrastructure that go with it, are vital to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military and geopolitical ambitions and one of the main reasons the Kremlin is now eyeing complete control of Crimea.

Nor will the fleet be outdated for much longer. It is soon to be restocked with billions of dollars worth of hardware. Lee Willett, editor of Jane’s Navy International, said six new submarines and six new frigates were scheduled for delivery in the next few years.

It is also expected to take delivery of other vessels such as the giant Mistral helicopter carrier, currently being built in France, as well as new attack aircraft.

For Russia, the fleet and its Sevastopol base are a guarantor of its southern borders and a platform for projecting power into the Black Sea and from there into the Mediterranean. Its base is also a docking point for Russian oil tankers bound for the Bosporus and the fleet will be tasked with protecting Russia’s South Stream gas pipeline once it is finished.

Russian analysts say Putin’s decision to intervene in Ukraine was in large part driven by his desire to safeguard the Sevastopol base as he feared the country’s new government would cancel a lease deal allowing the fleet to stay until 2042.

“Putin had every reason to think that would happen,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the Moscow-based Russia in Global Affairs journal. “The new government in Ukraine wants to move closer to the European Union and NATO. Their agenda would have meant the fleet would have to leave.”

Such a withdrawal, from a base that carries huge emotional and symbolic significance for Russians because of Sevastopol’s role in the Crimean War and World War Two, would have been a serious geopolitical defeat for Putin, said Lukyanov.

It would also have left Moscow without a viable Black Sea naval base. [Continue reading…]

McClatchy reports: In a Crimean Tatar cafe just off Kiev’s now-famous Maidan, or Independence Square, Igor Semyvolos looked at his phone Thursday and saw the news he’d been dreading.

The Crimean Parliament had just announced that its contested peninsula is now part of Russia. A referendum would be held March 16 to confirm the popularity of the decision, but the move, the Parliament said, was already done. Crimea might still be part of Ukraine in the eyes of the world, but to its regional Parliament, it was now Russian.

“This is war,” Semyvolos said.

The director of Ukraine’s Association of Middle Eastern Studies, an academic area that here includes Crimea, stared at a thick cup of Turkish coffee as he considered what would come next. Outside, Maidan was still basking in the afterglow after months of rebellion toppled the previous, pro-Russian regime, but the joy of that seeming victory is fading. Semyvolos sees it in the faces of Ukrainians outside — the stress and the growing realization that war is inevitable.

“It’s becoming clear that there will be war in Crimea, and that war will be for the independence of Ukraine,” he said. He paused to consider his statement for a second. He continued: “Ukraine will need help from the United States in this.”

Ukraine’s most recent trouble began last summer, when Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened trade sanctions against Ukraine if it signed a new trade agreement with the European Union. It quickly spiraled after Ukraine’s erstwhile president, Viktor Yanukovych, stepped away from the new ties to Europe in November, protesters crowded into Maidan and then, after months of protests, Yanukovych fled to Russia.

But the roots of the problem are far deeper, dating back centuries, and in that tangle of history is a series of ancient claims that for the people of Crimea, and Ukraine, are about to become very fresh again. [Continue reading…]

Andrew Wilson writes: Russia may be tightening its grip on Crimea, with little resistance to date, but they have yet to face the Crimean Tatar factor.

There are 266,000 Crimean Tatars in Crimea, over 13% of the local population. They are Sunni Muslim, traditionally pro-Ukrainian, and much better organised than the local Ukrainians, who make up 23% of the population.

A quick look at history tells you why: Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars en masse to Central Asia in 1944, and half of them died during or after the journey. They were only able to return after 1989; by which time their homes had gone and their culture had been erased.

The Crimean Tatars are still economically marginalised, with constant tensions over land-squatting and ‘irregular constructions’ (shanty towns).

But Crimea is their only home. Turkey hosts a large diaspora; but the peninsula was home to the Crimean Tatar Khanate from 1441 to 1783. The roots of Christianity in Crimea go back more than a thousand years; but the idea of Crimea as an ancient outpost of Orthodox Christianity is really only 160 years old, dating back to a programme of church-building to replace local mosques after the Crimean war of 1853-56. [Continue reading…]

Ian Traynor writes: In his 14 years in power grieving the loss of the Soviet empire, Vladimir Putin has launched three wars against Russia’s neighbours and territories formerly under the Kremlin’s domination. As a newly appointed prime minister in 1999, before becoming president on New Year’s Day 2000, he began with a war in Chechnya, brutally suppressing an armed insurrection against Moscow’s rule in the north Caucasus and razing the provincial capital, Grozny.

In 2008, the former KGB officer ordered a blitzkrieg against Georgia, partitioning the country in five days. He remains in control of 20% of Russia’s Black Sea neighbour: the territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Russian military also controls a slice of Moldova known as Transnistria in a frozen conflict dating from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the Crimea and Ukraine, however, in the event of full-scale war, Putin has opted for a game-changer with the potential to be Europe’s worst security nightmare since the revolutions of 1989 and the bloodiest since Slobodan Milosevic’s attempts to wrest control of former Yugoslavia resulted in four lost wars, more than 100,000 dead, and spawned seven new countries in the Balkans. Ukraine is a pivotal country on the EU’s eastern and Russia’s south-western borders. Territorially it is bigger than France. Its population is greater than those of Poland or Spain at 46 million. It has a proper military and is well armed. Ukraine was the Soviet Union’s arms manufacturing base; it remains in the top league of global arms exporters.

Ukraine’s military machine is no match for Russia’s. It has around 130,000 troops compared to around 850,000 in Russia. Its forces in Crimea are no match for the 15,000-plus men serving with the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol. Russia has more men in its western military division than there are in the entire Ukrainian armed forces. Ratios of fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, special forces units and Black Sea warships are similarly one-sided.

But Ukraine’s forces could inflict a lot of damage if forced to defend their country. With this in mind, three broad scenarios suggest themselves: [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: While Russia flexes its military might at its Black Sea naval base in Crimea, Moscow has another weapon that it has wielded against Ukraine in the past: natural gas supplies.

Russia provides more than half of Ukraine’s natural-gas needs and since 2006 has twice curtailed supplies in disputes over politics, price and late payments. Those supply cuts rattled countries across Europe that depend on the Russian pipelines that run through Ukraine.

But changes in the global trade in natural gas have blunted Moscow’s weapon, forcing the Russian pipeline monopoly Gazprom to cut prices worldwide and giving Ukraine slightly more bargaining power.

The boom in U.S. shale gas has left gas-exporting countries shopping for other customers. Europe, as it adds terminals to handle liquefied natural gas, will be able to offset its own declining production with supplies from countries such as Qatar. And in 2012, Norway’s Statoil sold more gas to other European nations than Russia’s Gazprom.

“Since the Russian supply cuts in 2006 and 2009, the tables have totally turned,” said Anders Aslund, a fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics who has advised Russia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Aslund said Ukraine once rivaled Germany as Gazprom’s biggest customer. Now, he said, “Gazprom’s challenge is to stay in the Ukrainian market.”

In December, Gazprom said it would discount the price paid by Ukraine, cutting it from about $11.50 per thousand cubic feet to $8.10. But that only brought Ukraine’s prices roughly in line with those being paid in other parts of Europe. Gazprom said it would review the price every quarter, meaning a new reset is possible at the end of March.

As clunky Soviet-era factories and mines have become more efficient or gone out of business, Ukraine’s domestic gas consumption has dropped nearly 40 percent over the past five years, cutting its imports from Russia in half, according to a report by Sberbank Investment Research. [Continue reading…]

Oleg Kashin writes: Russia and Ukraine split up 23 years ago. A whole generation has grown up in each country since then. Ukrainian children have studied the poetry of the nationalist Taras Shevchenko and they have internalized a heroic narrative about a country that has spent centuries fighting for its freedom. Russian children have spent summer holidays in Crimea and have grown up with a sense that today’s Russian-Ukrainian borders are merely temporary and notional. The Russian public views the Ukrainian state with a sense of irony and even contempt. This attitude is often unfair, but it is see Ukraine as a culturally heterogeneous patchwork. Travelling from a place like Lviv or Lutsk to a place like Kharkiv or Odessa, it is often hard to believe that these cities are part of the same country: Post-Soviet Ukraine is like Austria-Hungary—an empire made up of incongruous parts. In the mind of the Russian public, the justification for a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine settled into place many years ago: Russia has been unable to shake off the view that eastern Ukraine is Russian territory.

Clearly, this sentiment could have remained dormant for many decades. But Viktor Yanukovych’s rule in Kiev crumbled at the very point that President Vladimir Putin decided that he is at the pinnacle of his power. He vanquished his opposition, he hosted an Olympics, he triumphed in Syria, and he even kept Edward Snowden out of American custody. The 61-year-old Putin had achieved so many of his dream; the only thing he had yet to do was to become what the tsarist history books called a “gatherer of Russian lands.” The perfect opportunity presented itself, one that Putin couldn’t resist. And risks don’t really enter into his calculus anymore.

So if one is to make comparisons, then it shouldn’t be with 1968 Czechoslovakia, but with Serbia in 1914. Back then, the Russian tsar felt that he was the protector of all the Slavic people of Europe and entered into World War I, which ended with the collapse of his empire. Can Putin see that historical parallel now? I doubt it. In the 15 years of his rule, he has grown used to the fact that irrespective of their rhetoric, Western countries have generally approved of the Russian authorities. Putin genuinely believes that his “western partners” are cynics and hypocrites. Playing the role of “bad guy,” he believes, actually insulates him from far graver risks. This formula may sound paradoxical, but it has worked.

Oxana Shevel writes: [E]ven if diplomacy fails and the Russian military seizes Crimean territory with the intention of controlling it permanently, it will be much harder for Russia to establish control of Crimea than it was in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria. The main reason for this is the Crimean Tatars. The Tatars — a Muslim group that was deported en masse from Crimea by Stalin in 1944 and that for decades has waged a peaceful struggle for the right to return — have been coming back in droves since 1989. According to the latest Ukrainian census, from 2001, 243,433 Crimean Tatars account for 12.1 percent of the Crimean population of 2,033,700. They represent a highly mobilized and unified constituency that has consistently been pro-Ukrainian and opposed to pro-Russian separatism on the peninsula. Going back to the 1991 independence referendum, the narrow vote in favor of Ukrainian state independence in Crimea may have been thanks to the vote of the Crimean Tatars. Since then, the Crimean Tatars and their representative organ, the Mejlis, have cooperated with the pro-Ukrainian political parties. Leaders of the Mejlis such as Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov have been members of the Ukrainian parliament elected on the party list of Ukrainian nationalist parties such as Rukh in the 1990s and later from Our Ukraine party. On Feb. 26, the day before the Crimean parliament was taken over by the armed men, Crimean Tatars held a large rally near the parliament that was larger than a simultaneous pro-Russian rally. There has been no comparable local mobilized group opposed to Russian takeover in any other of the breakaway regions.

Although the group has been a staunch ally of the Ukrainian government against pro-Russian separatism on the peninsula, the Ukrainian central authorities, while benefiting from this support, have also been suspicious of the Crimean Tatars, who consider Crimea their historical homeland and have advocated measures such as changing the status of Crimean autonomy to make it the national-territorial autonomy of the Crimean Tatars as opposed to simply territorial (and de facto ethnic Russian autonomy given that ethnic Russians constitute more than 50 percent of the population in Crimea). The law on the status of the Crimean Tatars as indigenous peoples of Ukraine that the Tatar leaders have been pushing for many years remains unadopted.

Whatever the Tatar grievances against the Ukrainian state may be, when faced with the choice of being under either Russian or Ukrainian control, the Crimean Tatar leadership has consistently and unequivocally chosen Ukraine. [Continue reading…]