Since the renewal of Ukraine’s independence in 1991, no Ukrainian President or government had ever tried to integrate Crimea into a wider Ukrainian society. Crimea was always a special region, and not in any good sense of the word. For the ‘pro-Russian’, oligarch-controlled political forces, Crimea – with its predominantly Russian ethnic population – was a source of an ‘easy electorate’ that readily provided a significant share of votes against the ‘pro-western’ national democratic forces.
For the latter, Crimea was a perpetual headache: Ukrainian national democrats simply did not know what to do – in terms of socio-political integration – with 1.5 million ethnic Russians and hundreds of thousands of largely Russified Ukrainians. The national democrats, however, seemed to get along well with the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, an executive-representative body of the Crimean Tatar ethnic minority. The national democrats and the Mejlis shared scepticism towards the domination of the Russian culture in Crimea.
Pro-Russian sentiments – ranging from the insistence on the recognition of the official status of Russian language to outright secessionism – were always a prevalent ‘faith’ among the politically active citizens in Crimea. Not that they constituted a majority of the Crimean population, but the general political atmosphere, generated and sustained by Russia’s soft power, media and the Ukrainian ‘pro-Russian’ parties, was always pro-Russian.
