KIEV MAY LOOSE CRIMEA

The Ukrainian “orange” regime is threatening to crack down on organizers of the referendum on the Russian language. On February 22, Crimean lawmakers voted to put the issue of whether Russian should be Ukraine's second official language to a referendum during a March national election. Prosecutor of the Crimea Victor Shemchuk said he would appeal this decision as anti-constitutional. Victor Yushchenko’s lieutenant for the Crimea Vladimir Kulish is going to advise the Ukrainian president to overturn the decision on the same grounds. The Crimea is officially an autonomous republic within the Ukraine but its autonomy is fictious. Kiev constantly interferes into the Crimean affaires and holds the peninsula under its tight grip.
Following Ukraine's independence after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukrainian was declared the sole official language though the majority of the population, especially in the South-East of the country, speak Russian. The Crimea is almost 100% Russian speaking region. Russian is also a predominant language of Crimean Tatars and other minorities and a means of communication between various nationalities. The Ukrainian which is close to Russian and sounds to many Russian speakers as an uneducated parlance has been foisted on Crimeans since 1991. The success of this ukrainization is meagre. It resulted only in alienation of the Crimeans whose resentment of Ukrainian rule has been on the rise after the “orange” revolution in 2004.
If Yushchenko bans the referendum in the Crimea he will only give a boost to the growing secession movement. With other provinces willing to break away such as former Romanian territory Bukovina and Rusin ethnic group in the Western Ukraine, Donbass in the East and Odessa in the South Ukraine may fall apart in the near future and could cease to exist. The rulers in Kiev erroneously think that they could keep all their lands together by crackdowns, persecutions and intimidation.