Security Strategy of Ukraine in the Context of Ethnopolitical Challenges of the Annexed Crimea

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of ethnopolitical challenges in the national security system of Ukraine, which had led to the annexation of the peninsula, and also defines political and legal mechanisms for providing ethnopolitical security for conserving territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine in the struggle for de-occupation and reintegration of Crimea. It is determined that since the 1990s, scientists focused their attention on ethnopolitical destabilizing factors in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, in particular the constant support by Russia of the Russian community of the peninsula; lobbying the idea of the “Russian World” and “genuinely Russian Crimea”; the insufficient support by Ukraine of the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar communities, who could have opposed separatist threats. Thus, Russian ethnocultural environment did not only avoid scaling back in the years since the Soviet era but also dominated in the ethnopolitical space of Crimea. In turn, after returning to the territory, Crimean Tatars, unsatisfied with such a situation, demanded from the Ukrainian state the full vindication of their rights, including ethnocultural and property ones. Ethnocultural problems of the peninsula’s Ukrainian community were constantly ignored on the part of the authorities as in Crimea so in the official Kyiv, which contributed to the partial assimilation of the Ukrainians. To some extent, the demands of the ethnically politicized Russian majority in the peninsula were balanced by the growing ethnocultural and ethnopolitical demands of the Crimean Tatar minorities. Thus, it was possible to keep the peninsula ethnopolitically stable for many years by suspending the ethnopolitical conflict between the key ethnic communities. The article considers the problem of determining the legal status of Crimean Tatar people as the indigenous people of Ukraine in the context of the state ethnonational policy of Ukraine. It studies the contemporary state of the legal framework as for the regulation of the Crimean Tatar question and the legal status of the AR of Crimea.