March 17:
A day after voting to secede from Ukraine, the Crimean peninsula has formally applied for membership in the Russian Federation. The Voice of America reports that Crimea’s regional assembly has applied to have the region become a constituent part of Russia. The move has met with approval in Moscow, where the State Duma is poised to pass legislation to accept Crimea as a Russian region. “The results of the referendum in Crimea clearly showed that residents of Crimea see their future only as part of Russia,” Deputy Duma Speaker Sergei Neverov has said.
The Kremlin’s maneuvers in Ukraine have reinforced Russian views of their country’s international importance, a new poll has found. The Moscow Times cites a new survey conducted by the Levada Center, which found nearly two-thirds of respondents to consider their country as a “great power” – an increase of some 16 percent over 2011 levels. Moreover, nearly half of those surveyed “want Russia to be seen as a superpower that is respected and feared by other countries,” the paper reports.
[Editor’s Note: Given the effect of Russia’s increasingly authoritarian political climate on pollsters and respondents alike, the results of public opinion surveys in Russia should be viewed with some caution.]
In response to Crimea’s referendum, which has been widely decried in the West as illegitimate and jury-rigged by Moscow, both the United States and the European Union have levied preliminary sanctions at the Kremlin. McClatchy reports that the U.S. sanctions targeted eleven officials within Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, including Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Dmitry Rogozin. Europe, meanwhile, has taken aim at twenty-one Russian and Ukrainian individuals with its blacklist.
March 18:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a treaty formally incorporating Crimea into the Russian Federation, Reuters reports. The signing was followed by a rare address by Putin before a joint session of the Russian legislature, in which the Russian president declared that “In the hearts and minds of people, Crimea has always been and remains an inseparable part of Russia." The Russian parliament is expected to ratify the treaty in a matter of days.
In the wake of Crimea’s referendum and subsequent moves to join Russia, Moscow is now positioned to “dramatically expand” its military presence on the peninsula, a leading analyst has warned. Writing in his Window on Eurasia blog, Paul Goble notes that Russia—previously constrained in its operation and manning of its naval base at Sevastopol by Ukrainian rules—is now free to use the base as its sees fit. In turn, an expansion of Russia’s manpower and capabilities at Sevastopol would “change the military balance in the Black and Mediterranean seas, an outcome that could have geopolitical consequences as severe as Vladimir Putin’s efforts to dismantle and humble Ukraine.”
March 20:
As part of its efforts to consolidate power in Crimea, Russia has begun handing out passports to residents of the region. China’s Xinhua news agency cites Konstantin Romodanovsky, head of Russia’s Federal Migration Service, as saying that, in the wake of President Putin’s signing of a treaty formally annexing Crimea, “work has started” integrating the region into the Russian Federation.
Deepening tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine could spill over into another arena: that of Iran’s nuclear program, and the international effort now underway to contain it. The Associated Press reports a top Russian diplomat as warning that Moscow could use the Iranian file to “raise the stakes” with the U.S. and Europe if relations deteriorate further. "We wouldn't like to use these talks as an element of the game of raising the stakes,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in comments to the Interfax news agency. "But if they force us into that, we will take retaliatory measures here as well. The historic importance of what happened in the last weeks and days regarding the restoration of historical justice and reunification of Crimea with Russia is incomparable to what we are dealing with in the Iranian issue."