The power struggle that has dominated Ukrainian politics since the Orange Revolution of 2004/2005 will be at least partially resolved by the country’s upcoming presidential elections -- elections that are now almost certain to sweep the greatly unpopular pro-Western president, Victor Yushchenko, from power. What will come after remains to be seen.

 

My June 7-13 trip to Ukraine focused, however, not on its presidential elections, but on the future of Crimea. The Crimean Peninsula has been under Russian control since Czarist times. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev gave administrative control of the region to Ukraine. But part of the Ukrainian Peninsula, the legendary Black Sea Port of Sevastopol, continued to report directly to Moscow. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, all of Crimea became Ukrainian. Now two factors are at work to dilute or eliminate Ukrainian sovereignty.

 

The first is the mounting ethnic challenge posed by the Crimea’s Tatar minority. The forbears of Crimean Tatars ran the Crimean Khanate, a huge territory that included present day Crimea. By the end of World War II, the remaining one million Tatars were forcibly removed from Crimea - primarily into exile in Central Asia.

 

Following the Soviet collapse, the Tatars began to return to their historic homeland. Today their number in Ukraine is estimated to be upward of 250,000. They maintain a governing structure outside the Ukrainian State and local Crimean governments. Their parliament, known as the Mejles, distributes funds from abroad (predominantly Muslim countries) and provides guidance to the Tatar community.

 

That guidance is strategic in nature. It includes, among other things, strong community pressure for families to have five or six children. As a result the percentage of Tatars in Crimea, currently estimated at more than 10 percent of the population, is sure to grow.

 

This dynamic is well understood on the ground in Crimea, where Slavs and Tatars alike recognize that, unchecked, the Peninsula will eventually regain a Tatar majority. But the effects of this trend are already being felt.

 

To ensure that they have prime real estate for their expanded numbers, Crimea’s Tatars have collectively engaged in mass squatting. It works like this: because there is no effective mortgage system in Ukraine, people have to pay cash for their homes. And because most citizens cannot do this, the law permits people to lay claim to a piece of property if they have begun to build something on it. As a result, driving through parts of eastern Crimea, one can see hundreds of barely started, uninhabited, small structures filling hundreds of acres of land. It is ugly, and none too popular with the Slavs, but it protects the Tatars’ property rights and eventually will provide homes for their expanded population to live.

 

Today’s Tatars are optimistic about the creation of a modern-day Crimean Khanate, for obvious reasons. Given their birthrate, they believe that time is clearly on their side. Especially if a more powerful Russia does not again regain control of Crimea, they may be right.

 

The more immediate problem, however, concerns Russian designs on the Peninsula, and Sevastopol in particular. In spite of the agreement formalizing their borders struck by Moscow and Kyiv a decade ago, forces in both Russia and Crimea hope to bring part or all of Crimea under Russian sovereignty.

 

The most likely moment of danger is when Russia’s lease of its base in Sevastopol expires in 2017. Will Russia leave, or not? And if it does not, how will Ukraine respond? After countless discussions in Kyiv, Moscow, and Crimea, I must report that the answer is not clear to anyone. Over the next several years, this issue will be a headline waiting to happen.