A new U.N. report offers a stark warning.
Just occasionally, the United Nations gets things exactly right. A fine example of that is the recent release of a report from its special investigative mission on human-rights abuses in Crimea. The U.N. verdict? There have been “multiple and grave” violations—up to and including illegal detentions and kidnappings, torture, and murder—since Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
Most of the worst abuses, the report acknowledges, occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion. But ordinary citizens, as well as human-rights activists, are still being abducted and moved to prisons in Russia—a startling violation of international law—where several have died. Ukrainians in Crimea, moreover, have been forced to become Russian citizens: If they refuse, they lose basic political rights, as well as jobs and property. It’s a measure of the tenuous state of human rights in Crimea that the mission—authorized by the U.N., of which Russia has been a member-state since the agency’s founding—has largely been obliged to depend on evidence gathered from the safety of Ukraine.
Of course, the issuance of yet another U.N. report on human-rights abuse prompts a shrug. So what? The United Nations has consistently and repeatedly condemned Russia’s invasion, and the United States and European Union have long since imposed sanctions. It is true, as Vladimir Putin argues, that the Soviet Union arbitrarily detached Crimea from Russia and incorporated it into the Ukraine in 1954. It may even be argued, as Putin claims, that the Russian Federation is a more plausible historic home for the Crimean peninsula than Ukraine. But these are questions to be settled by open debate and democratic norms, not military conquest. Putin did not act in response to Crimean appeals but to Russian revanchism.
The sad fact, of course, is that as time passes, and repression in Crimea deepens, the likelihood of redress diminishes. Obviously, the Russian strategy is to make life in Crimea intolerable for Ukrainians unwilling to submit to Russian dominion, and harass and punish those who don’t leave voluntarily. Annexation is essentially a fait accompli. Putin knows this—and so do Brussels and Washington.
The U.N. report is best read as a warning. The invasion of Crimea three years ago emboldened Vladimir Putin to repeat the process with a slow-motion annexation of Ukraine. But while the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk are still terrorized by Russian-controlled militias, the United States and the E.U. have effectively reinforced Ukraine’s elected government in Kiev—and Russian ambition in Ukraine is, for the time being, halted.
Whether it ends with Crimea, we doubt. Is the rest of Ukraine next? Belarus? The Baltic states? Poland? Russian expansionism is a real thing, and we’d better be prepared for it.
Image: The Kerch Strait Bridge will connect annexed Crimea with mainland Russia. Photo credit: Lev Fedoseyev\TASS via Getty Images
Written by The Editors