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Are you referring to the 2014 Crimean referendum? I have qualms about a referendum on a topic directly impacted by the Russians importing their own into that land and deporting the Tatars for centuries, but even setting that aside, Crimea was recognized by all side to be part of Ukraine. It is not the same for a nation to insist its territory remain part of it and a nation to invade another with the goal of yoking the recipient because it has strategic interests to do so.
What makes the territory belong to the nation in the first place? Either it is raw force, in which case there is no point debating the morality to begin with, or it is some sort of argument from legitimacy. But how can one argue for the legitimacy of preserving previous territorial integrity after a violent revolution overthrows a person whom a bunch of the country had voted for?
Clearly borders themselves do not have a legitimacy that transcends all other considerations. If they had, then the breakup of the USSR would have been illegitimate to begin with. So we probably agree that in some cases changes of borders are legitimate.
So the question is, did the government that come to power in 2014 in Kiev have a legitimate claim to all of the territory that it claimed, despite the fact that many people living in that territory did not want to be ruled by that new government?
I do not insist that the answer is necessarily "no". But consider this scenario, by way of comparison. Let's say that Trump gets fairly elected in 2024, no fraud. A variety of anti-Trump groups then rebel and overthrow the Trump administration by force. Trump flees the country. Soon afterward, a bunch of secession movements break out in red states. The new DC government claims that the territorial integrity of the US cannot be violated and threatens military force to stop the secessionists.
In this example, who would be right and who would be wrong?
Of course, it would be fair to say, it is not quite so simple. Consider a version of the above scenario that continues with some nuclear power's military forces entering Texas on the grounds of helping the secessionists. Who is right and who is wrong then?
At the least, I will claim that this is not a simple black and white moral question.
I would certainly hope that the post-Maidan government sought to ratify its legitimacy after Yanukovich fled. If parts of Ukraine desire to secede, that desire should probably be listened to. But I don't consider it unreasonable for the government to assume that anyone wanting to do so has to engage with the existing systems in place to depart, not automatically be considered independent since a non-democratic change just took place. I understand the concern that they wouldn't agree, but there is nothing wrong with at least trying.
Considering that previous referenda (1991, 1994) in which Crimea overwhelmingly voted for independence and then greater autonomy from Ukraine were ignored by the central government, what grounds did they have to believe that they would fare better this time after a government got couped in that was explicitly against their ethnicity and chosen political representatives? (And then, consider the reasonably widespread repressions against the pro-Russian population that even Amnesty noted before almost getting cancelled for it.)
I wasn't aware of this, and I think my comment suggested my lack of knowledge about the Crimean independence issue. This is a fair rebuttal to the point. I don't think this changes my view that Kiev and Moscow's relationship to Crimea aren't equivalent enough to call both of them tyrants in the same measure, and I do endorse the idea that if Crimea wants to be free, Ukraine should seriously consider letting them be as such.
I'm not familiar with the repressions you're speaking of, got a link?
The main repressions story I was thinking of was this, but there was also an older report just shortly after Euromaidan. The "almost cancellation" incident, however, actually was a much later story about the Ukrainian army garrisoning in civilian objects from after the war broke out, which I had mentally conflated with the previous ones; sorry about the mistake.
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See ¶¶ 99–103 of this PDF from a commission of the Council of Europe. The Ukrainian legislature has decreed that a publisher cannot print a Russian-language newspaper without simultaneously printing an equal number of copies in the Ukrainian language. Obviously, it is not likely that a Russian-language newspaper will have many Ukrainian-language readers, so this just forces Russian-language publishers to either waste huge amounts of money on translating and printing newspapers that won't be read, or stop printing altogether.
¶¶ 85–92 point out some other bad parts of the same legislation—e. g., it is illegal for a Russian-language tour to be given to a non-foreigner tourist, and the Russian language can be used in cultural, artistic, recreational, and entertainment events only if it is "justified by the artistic or creative concept of the event organizer".
(I say "Russian", but ¶ 39 explains that the law applies generically to all "minority languages", which most prominently include Russian, Byelorussian, and Yiddish. It does not apply to "indigenous" languages, such as Crimean Tatar, or to official languages of the EU, such as Romanian.)
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