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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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