4 Myths About the Ukraine Crisis, Crimea and NATO (Updated)

Truth is one of the first victims of war. The Russian "hybrid war" on Ukraine is no different.

Here are four common myths about the crisis in Ukraine propagated by the Kremlin and its backers in the West.

Myth #1
Russia's invasion of Crimea was a logical reaction to a U.S. and European plot to expand NATO. Part of the plot was overthrowing Ukraine's pro-Moscow president and installing a new pro-NATO government.

This commonly made claim may make sense if Ukraine's new government actually wanted to join NATO.

In fact, the new government isn't interested in NATO, Ukrainian foreign minister Andriy Deshchytsia told Vienna daily Die Presse Saturday.

"The Finnish model (of non-alignment) is an option for Ukraine: neighbour of Russia, member of the EU but not a member of NATO," he said.

U.S. president Barack Obama, for his part, also said today NATO isn't planning to admit Ukraine as a member, a situation he said won't change any time soon, reports state broadcaster Russia Today.

NATO previously rejected Ukraine for membership in 2008.

Meanwhile, in Russia, many don't agree that intervention in Ukraine was the logical reaction to events there.

In a survey in February, only 15 percent of Russians agreed Moscow should intervene in Ukraine to help pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych stay in power, according to the Kremlin's own pollster.

Seventy-three percent disagreed with intervention in what they believed was an internal matter for Ukrainians.

In mid-March, tens of thousands of Russians marched in Moscow to protest the Crimea invasion.

UPDATE (Nov. 30, 2014): Despite months of covert Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine, a majority of Ukrainians shifted to supporting NATO accession only in August after the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 -- by all evidence, with a Russian-supplied anti-aircraft missile operated by Moscow-backed militants -- and then a full-scale invasion by units of Russia's regular army involving thousands of troops.

A new Ukrainian Parliament elected in October has as a result pledged to put Ukraine on the road to joining NATO. Pro-NATO sentiment in Ukraine thus followed Russia's actions. It didn't predate them.

Myth #2
"Washington spent $5 billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars engineering a coup in Ukraine."

This claim, made in the progressive publication Counterpunch in February, has also showed up in this item from state broadcaster Russia Today and on conspiracy sites.

The claim is based on a distortion of Dec. 2013 comments by U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland.

What Nuland actually said was that the U.S. had given Ukraine $5 billion in aid since Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

"The money in question was spent over more than 20 years," said this article debunking the claim in the Tamba Bay Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact column.

"Yanukovych was elected in 2010. So any connection between the protests and the $5 billion is inaccurate."

The mass protests in Ukraine that swept Yanukovych out of power in February started only last November.

As well, the bulk of the aid appears to have gone to the Ukrainian government for such things as border security and nuclear non-proliferation -- not NGOs.

In fact, given the astonishing corruption of Yanukovych's regime, a good part of the U.S. aid since 2010 likely wound up in his pockets or those of his cronies.

Fun fact: The U.S. has also given Russia $17.8 billion in economic and military aid since 1991 -- more than triple what Ukraine got -- according to data from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

As for the mass protests that overthrew Yanukovych, even Russian president Vladimir Putin has said Yanukovych's corruption was the key motivation for the protests.

"Generally, people wanted change," he said in a press conference after he invaded Crimea in late February. He didn't mention NATO once.

A December survey of participants in the protests found that their three main motivations were police brutality, Yanukovych's refusal to sign an agreement on association with the European Union and a "desire to change life in Ukraine."

Their main demands were new elections and release of arrested protesters. Again, no mention of NATO.

Ninety-two percent said they didn't belong to any party or civic organization.

Myth #3
Ukraine's new leaders are anti-Semitic Nazis.

Putin and other Russian officials frequently accuse Ukraine's new government of being anti-Semitic Russophobes to justify the invasion of Crimea.

Some commentators in the West have parroted these claims, calling Kyiv's new authorities "Nazis."

While some far-right elements were indeed present among the hundreds of thousands whose protests swept Yanukovych out of power, Ukrainian Jewish leaders have dismissed the anti-Semitism claims.

In an open letter to Putin in March, over 200 prominent Ukrainian Jewish figures denounced his invasion of Crimea and said anti-Semitism is more of a problem in Russia than Ukraine.

They said Ukraine's new cabinet includes several minority members, including a Jewish deputy prime minister, two ethnic Russians and an Armenian.

"We do not wish to be 'defended' by sundering Ukraine and annexing its territory," they said. "We decisively call for you not to intervene in internal Ukrainian affairs, to return Russian armed forces to their normal fixed peacetime location and to stop encouraging pro-Russian separatism.

"Our very few nationalists (in Ukraine) are well controlled by civil society and the new Ukrainian government -- which is more than can be said for the Russian neo-Nazis, who are encouraged by your security services."

A series of articles on the website of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine -- the country's largest Jewish umbrella group -- says anti-Semitism wasn't a problem in the anti-Yanukovych protests and that Jewish activists played prominent roles on the barricades.

See more Jewish perspectives on the protests here and more analysis debunking Putin's claims here and here from Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's committee on conscience.

As for Russophobia, 26 percent of participants in the anti-Yanukovych protests said in a survey they spoke Russian at home. Another 19 percent spoke both Russian and Ukrainian.

Meanwhile, Putin himself came under fire last year for making anti-Semitic remarks at Moscow's Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.

Putin has also increasingly aligned himself with Russia's own far right (see also here), which has strongly backed his Crimea invasion and other policies, such as his anti-gay legislation.

UPDATE (Nov. 30, 2014): Ukraine's pro-democracy movement has been inaccurately depicted as "fascist" by the Kremlin and its supporters in the West, writes Anton Shekhovtsov, a University College London researcher specializing in Europe's far right who edits the "Explorations of the Far Right" book series.

Ironically, the propaganda masks the Kremlin's own links with European fascist groups, he says. "The large network consisting of pro-Russian authors and institutions is a hard/extreme right breeding-ground of all kinds of conspiracy theories, Euroscepticism, racism and anti-democratic theories."

Since Russia began its covert war in Ukraine last spring, Russian state media and Kremlin-backed militants in Ukraine have stepped up anti-Semitic rhetoric and xenophobia, while Moscow has forged closer ties with Europe's far right. 

In late November, a Kremlin-linked Russian bank loaned France's far-right National Front 9 million euros amid more revelations about Moscow's links with far-right political parties across Europe that support Putin's foreign policy in Ukraine and anti-gay stance at home.

Myth #4
Crimea is historically Russian and shouldn't be part of Ukraine anyway.

Crimea is historically the homeland of the Crimean Tatar people, not Russians.

Tatars and their Mongol allies controlled Crimea for more than five centuries from the 1230s until Russia invaded in 1783.

Prior to the 1230s, much of it had belonged to Kyivan Rus' (the predecessor of modern-day Ukraine) for over 200 years.

After the Russian invasion in 1783, Tatars became a minority due to a policy of Russification and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's mass deportation of the entire Tatar population to Siberia and the Far East after World War II. Half of Tatars died in the deportation.

Today, many Tatars have returned to their land, and they now make up 12 percent of Crimea's population.

Their leaders strongly back staying in Ukraine and say 99 percent of their people boycotted the fraud-riddled March 16 Crimean referendum on accession to Russia, which they considered illegitimate.

Alarm has increased since Tatar rights activist Reshat Ametov, a father of three, was found dead in mid-March with signs of torture after he was kidnapped by men in military uniforms.

Tatar leaders announced yesterday they are considering holding their own referendum on whether to be part of Ukraine or Russia.

"Nobody asked us, the Crimean Tatars... in what conditions we want to live," Tatar official Renat Chubarov said.

UPDATE (Nov. 30, 2014): The Russian president's own human rights council has rejected the results of the Crimean referendum on joining Russia in March.

The body said in a report in May that only 50 to 60 percent of Crimea residents supported accession to Russia (not 97 percent as claimed officially) and that turnout was only 30 to 50 percent (not 83 percent as claimed officially). 

In other words, only 15 to 30 percent of eligible voters backed joining Russia -- even less than in recent surveys, which generally showed 40 to 45-percent support for the idea.

In another survey in September by an institute close to local Moscow-backed authorities, only 27 percent of residents of Simferopol, Crimea's administrative centre, said they consider themselves as Russian citizens.

Since the Russian takeover, the human rights situation for Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians in Crimea has deteriorated gravely, the United Nations and human rights groups have reported.

UPDATE (Jan. 25, 2015): Former militant commander Igor "Strelkov" Girkin, who says he was a colonel in Russia's FSB intelligence agency, acknowledges on Russian TV that Moscow-backed militants in Ukraine's Crimea peninsula forcibly gathered regional deputies to stage a fraud-riddled referendum on joining Russia last March.

"I did not see any support from (Crimea) state authorities in Simferopol (the regional capital)," he says. "It was the militants who gathered the deputies so they would accept this (the referendum)." (See an English account of Girkin's remarks here.)

Ukraine Crisis: Crimean Tatar Rights Activist Found Dead With Signs of Torture

Crimea Tatar concerns about their fate under Russian occupation have sharpened after a Tatar rights activist was found dead Monday with signs of torture.

Thousands attended the funeral Tuesday of Tatar rights activist Reshat Ametov, 38, the Kyiv Post reports.

Ametov was a father of three, this story said.

Ametov had been missing since he was hauled off from a protest by three men in military uniforms in Simferopol, Crimea, in early March.

His naked body was found Monday, the day after Crimeans voted in a fraud-riddled referendum on whether to quit Ukraine and join Russia.

UPDATE: Videos have appeared on YouTube (see here and here) showing Ametov being detained by three men, reports Ukrainska Pravda in this item.

"Only the Beginning"

"This wasn't an ordinary death," Tatar rights activist Ayder Ismailov is quoted telling the Kyiv Post.

"It was a kind of genocide, an inhuman crime, and we understand that we have to come together and consolidate and be very wary because I'm convinced this is only the beginning," Ismailov said.

Thousands of Russian soldiers without insignia took control of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in late February after mass protests forced out the country's pro-Moscow president.

"Lawless" Climate in Crimea

Rights groups have since decried the "lawless" climate in Crimea, including detention of journalists and pro-Ukraine activists.

Tatar leaders have said their people fear leaving their homes at night and walking in city centres, while up to 200 Tatar families have fled to Ukraine.

Tatar and Ukrainian officials called for a boycott of the Crimean referendum, calling it illegitimate.

Some Tatars have said they fear a repeat of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's post-World War II mass deportation of Tatars, in which half their population died.

Ukraine Crisis: 7 Reasons Why Crimea Results Aren't Credible -- And Media Coverage Stinks

Media reporting on Sunday's referendum in Crimea is a study in bad journalism.

An Associated Press story today on the results was typical. 

"Crimea Referendum: Final Results Show 97 Percent of Voters in Crimea Support Joining Russia," the title uncritically said.

Crimean electoral chief Mikhail Malyshev is quoted saying his officials hadn't gotten "a single complaint" about the vote.

The results are beyond dispute, Russian parliamentarian Valery Ryazantsev is quoted saying. 

"(There are) absolutely no reasons to consider the vote results illegitimate."

Voter turnout was supposedly 83 percent, Malyshev said in other stories.

North Korea-Style Results

The AP story was typical of much of the coverage.

Like many other stories on the vote, AP portrayed the implausible 97-percent result with no qualification. It also failed to note reports of intimidation, fraud and misinformation in Crimea that raise questions about the referendum results. 

The Wall Street Journal's similarly unqualified headline was "Ukraine Region Votes to Join Russia." Even U.S. government-run Voice of America ran with the uncritical title "Crimea Votes in Favor of Union With Russia."

In fact, the Crimean results are reminiscent of similarly absurd votes in Turkmenistan (whose president won 97 percent of votes in 2012), North Korea (where Kim Jong-un recently won 100 percent of votes) and Chechnya (where one overenthusiastic polling station made the mistake of reporting a 107-percent turnout in 2012, with all but one of the votes going to Russia's Vladimir Putin).

7 Reasons Official Results Not Credible

Here are seven reasons to suggest the Crimean referendum result is implausible -- and that we actually have no idea if most Crimeans really voted to join Russia:

1) Reports of Fraud: Russian citizens were reportedly allowed to vote in the referendum, while one person was able to vote four times, the Kyiv Post reported today.

News reports also said some referendum ballots reportedly arrived pre-marked.

Malyshev, the Crimean electoral chief, also acknowledged that deceased people may have been included on electoral lists, raising more possibility for fraud, the Kyiv Post said.

In another Kyiv Post story, a Russian journalist is quoted saying she was allowed to vote after showing a temporary one-year residency permit and disclosing to an election official that she is a Russian citizen.

"According to all the laws, this is illegal," the journalist says in this interview on YouTube describing how she managed to vote.

"I am a foreign citizen. How can I decide the destiny of the Crimean Autonomous Republic of Ukraine?" she asked, saying she "obviously questions the legitimacy of the whole referendum."

2) Turnout Was Closer to 30%, Tatar Leader Says: Crimean Tatar officials monitoring the vote report that 99 percent of Tatars boycotted the vote, while overall turnout was actually only about 30 percent, said this Espreso.tv story and this Ukrinform item.

The huge turnout claimed for Sunday's referendum is also in sharp contrast to historic turnout in recent elections in Crimea, which hovers at around 50 percent, Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev told Espreso.tv.

For example, only 56 percent of Crimeans voted in the 2007 Ukrainian parliamentary election. 

In addition, for the vote Sunday, Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian officials called for a boycott. Tatars and Ukrainians make up 36 percent of the Crimean population, further suggesting the claimed turnout is implausible.

3) Surveys Show Only 40-45% Pro-Russia Support: Two recent surveys, including one in early March, suggest only 40 to 45 percent of Crimeans actually support accession to Russia.

Support wasn't in majority territory and was nowhere close to the overwhelming result claimed by Crimea's pro-Russia government, which was installed at gunpoint after pro-Russia soldiers without insignia took over Crimea's legislature.

4) No International Observers: Outside monitors weren't present to monitor the vote -- a point many reporters failed to mention in their stories.

The Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe was in fact prevented from sending observers into Crimea on three occasions in the days leading up to the vote, while UN envoy Robert Serry was threatened by pro-Russian armed gunmen when he entered the region and was forced to leave.

Crimean authorities later invited the OSCE to send observers, but by this point the organization declined, citing its previous failed attempts to enter the territory and calling the vote illegal.

A small number of unofficial observers were invited from other countries, including a delegation of the European far right and neo-Nazis. The Russian government reportedly offered to pay expenses of any Russian-speaking EU citizens who wanted to act as an observer.

Reporters were also not allowed to observe voting, the Kyiv Post reported today.

5) Intimidation by Pro-Russia Forces: Few stories mentioned the multiplying reports of rights abuses in Crimea since Russian soldiers took control of the Ukrainian territory.

The rights climate again suggests voting wasn't conducted in legitimate circumstances.

The group Reporters Without Borders has called the region "lawless," while journalists and pro-Ukraine activists have been detained and gone missing. 

Crimean authorities took Ukrainian TV off the air, while blanketing the region with signs and messages supporting accession to Russia.

Heavily armed pro-Russia gunmen and gangs are ubiquitous and have created a climate of intimidation. Tatars say their people are afraid to venture into city centres and are fleeing to Ukraine.

Adding to concerns, a Tatar rights activist was found dead Monday in Crimea with signs of torture, the Kyiv Post reports.

6) Climate of Deception and Legal Impunity: Few reports questioned whether the vote could be credible in a generalized climate of misinformation and legal violations. 

That includes bizarre Russian and Crimean government denials that the thousands of Russian-speaking soldiers who have taken control of Crimea are in fact Russian soldiers.

It also includes Russia's discredited claims that it intervened in Crimea to stop anti-Semitic attacks.

Also salient, of course, is Russia's creeping invasion of Ukraine in violation of international law.

7) Exit Poll Dubious Too: The referendum result coincided closely with a widely reported exit poll yesterday that supposedly found 93 percent of voters favoured accession to Russia.

This poll was also uncritically reported in many stories. (See for example this BBC item yesterday.)

Unmentioned in most stories was the fact that the poll was commissioned by the KrimInform news service, which was recently created by Russia's state-owned Itar-Tass news agency.

The connection is important to note because of the Russian government's tightening control over media and the Russian media's notoriously pro-Kremlin coverage of the crisis in Ukraine.

Not sure why reporters outside Russia didn't do a better job.

Ukraine Crisis: Human Rights Abuses Escalate in "Lawless" Crimea

Numerous reports of rights abuses have emerged in Crimea since thousands of Russian soldiers invaded the Ukrainian autonomous region.

- Many journalists in Crimea have been detained, threatened and had equipment seized, said the group Reporters Without Borders in a March 7 statement titled "Freedom of Information in Dire State in Crimea."

"We are alarmed by the steady escalation in violations of journalists' rights in Crimea, which is turning into a lawless region controlled by armed bands whose anonymity reinforces their impunity," the group noted in a follow-up statement March 10.

"The frequency of deliberate attacks on journalists and the scale of the censorship suggest a desire to turn the region into a black hole for news and information."

Since those statements, French TV documentary maker David Geoffrion, working for France's Canal+ network, was arrested by pro-Russian gunmen on March 13, Reuters reported.

Activists Detained, Missing

- Andriy Shekun, leader of the EuroMaidan-Crimea pro-democracy group, was detained on March 9 by a pro-Russia defense militia in Simferopol, Crimea, along with a fellow activist, Anatoli Kowalski (see this and this news item). The militia seizing the men was linked with Russian Unity, the party of Crimea's self-proclaimed prime minister Sergei Aksyonov.

Both men are still missing. The police in Simferopol say they are not in their custody, reports Espreso.tv in this March 9 Ukrainian-language item.

- Also on March 9, pro-Russia militia detained two groups of Ukrainian journalists and activists while trying to enter Crimea, this item reports. They were held two nights, beaten and robbed, this Ukrainska Pravda account says.

Marchers Beaten

- Pro-Russia activists attacked and beat people attending a Ukrainian rally to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, the BBC reported March 10. Some of the Russian-speaking attackers wielded whips and threatened BBC journalists at the scene.

- Crimea's new pro-Russia government (read more about how it came to power here) has ordered nearly all Ukrainian TV channels off the air in the territory, replacing some with Russian ones, Ukrainian-language Espreso.tv reported March 9.

Tatar Minority Afraid, Many Flee

- Crimea's Tatar minority, which is strongly opposed to the takeover of the region by Russian troops, say they fear being out at night or walking in city centres, which are patrolled by armed pro-Russia gangs.

"I don't even go to Simferopol any more," said one Tatar man in this Kyiv Post story.

"If they see me, as a Crimean Tatar man, they will attack me."

Tatar leaders have called for a boycott of Sunday's referendum on whether Crimea should join Russia, which Ukraine and the G-7 countries say they won't recognize and call illegal.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin deported the Tatar people from Crimea to the Far East and Siberia after World War II on the pretext that some Tatars collaborated with Nazi Germany. Half of the Tatar population died in the forced deportations.

Many Tatars have since trickled back to their homeland. But now, many fear they could be deported again, this Kyiv Post story says.

The story says 150 to 200 Tatar families have left Crimea to seek refuge in western Ukraine since Russian troops invaded at the end of February.

International Observers Kept Out

- Pro-Russia gunmen have prevented international observers from entering Crimea to investigate the rights situation.

UN envoy Robert Serry was confronted by armed gunmen, threatened and forced to leave Crimea while on a fact-finding mission.

Meanwhile, observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe were turned back on three consecutive days from entering Crimea.