But it was not possible to publish it in German media. For one reason or another, there was a refusal. The most famous German site said: their editorial policy is that they themselves order publications and "do not post initiative materials". Another media replied that publishing personal appeals was not their editorial policy. The time passed, Christian Lindner continued (and continues) to follow his line, so there was no sense in looking further in Germany for a media that could have another editorial policy. I felt that German pluralism was largely a virtual phenomenon, about the same as "free democrats" who, while remaining liberals, wanted to deal with Putin's dictatorship that had despised both freedom and democracy.
Lindner's proposal to "encapsulate the Crimean problem for indefinite time" is almost identical to the official Kremlin's vision. Despite the fact that the leader of "free democracy" expresses his disagreement with the annexation of the Crimea, "indefinite time", and even without a hint of "de-encapsulation" in the future, is identical for the Kremlin regime with Putin's "the Crimean issue is closed". This was announced in Moscow in 2014, after the occupation and annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula.
The problem of the Crimea is not closed, and it will not be possible to encapsulate it, because it is not only about violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and aggression of one country - a UN member - against another country - a member and one of the founders of the United Nations. It's about unprecedented neglect of international law and violation of international security guarantees.The Final Act of the CSCE of 1975 and the Paris Charter of 1990 were the backbone of peace, stability and development in Europe after the World War II and after the end of the Cold War. Putin's Russia ruined all this. As well as the security guarantees given to Ukraine by the nuclear states under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 in exchange for its voluntary abandonment of the world's third largest nuclear arsenal. As for the last point, we see Lindner's amnesia in this issue. He does not even mention that. It is bad for a prospective Foreign Minister of Germany.
However, Lindner does not see much of what Russia did and does. He does not remember that in 2008 Russia invaded Georgia, separated the Tskhinvali region and created a puppet quasi-state the Republic of South Ossetia, recognized a separatist pseudo-state Abkhazia that Russia had created in the 1990s on the territory of Georgia. He does not remember that the Russian Federation failed to comply with the decision of the Istanbul OSCE Summit in 1999, which ordered the withdrawal of Russian troops from the territory of the Transnistrian part of Moldova, and refuses to do it now. Of course, it was a long time ago, back in the late 1990's, but the barbaric bombing of Aleppo by Russian aircraft was not so long ago, in the fall of 2016. Thousands of civilians in this city were killed by banned cassette and phosphorus air bombs. And those, who were hiding in the cellars (believed to be in a safe place), died of penetrating deep underground bunker-busting bombs. He does not remember this, too!
It is unlikely that Lindner reads daily reports of the death of Ukrainians in the Donbas, where Russia continues aggression against Ukraine, using as a cover the so-called Minsk agreements and the "ceasefire regime". He does not pay any attention to how echelons with tanks and military equipment have begun to move from the depths of Russia to the borders of Ukraine and the Baltic States since the beginning of August.
I do not know if the leader of free democrats is aware that an indigenous people - the Crimean Tatars - live on the Crimean peninsula, who make up 14% of the population of the peninsula. The Crimea is their land, they have no any other one. Crimean Tatars passed through Stalin's deportation in 1944, now they are again afraid of their destiny, because the current Kremlin regime glorifies Stalin and Stalinism. This is equivalent if, in Germany, they would begin to glorify Hitler and Nazism.
It is unlikely that he knows that Russia has launched repressions in the occupied Crimea. The peninsula was part of Ukraine since 1954. Autonomous Republic of Crimea - the peninsula got this status being a part of an independent Ukraine, since 1999 it had own constitution with very broad rights. All this is trampled and destroyed by the invaders. They made the Crimea an ordinary region of Russia, depriving it of its rights and opportunities for development, created by Ukraine, turning it into a military base for the fight against NATO. Contrary to the norms of international humanitarian law, Russia conducts illegal conscriptions of Ukrainian citizens to the Russian Armed Forces in the Crimea, and military propaganda and propaganda of hatred and hostility towards democratic countries are conducted even among children.
They work out technologies of pressure against dissidents and carry out large-scale repressions. Almost fifty Crimeans, citizens of Ukraine, were detained on roughly fabricated suspicions for their civic position and disagreement with the occupation of the Crimea. Volodymyr Baluch, an ethnic Ukrainian, a Crimean farmer, raised the Ukrainian flag on the roof of his house in protest of the occupation. His house was searched illegally three times, the flag was torn off. But they could not force him to take it off. Then he was planted cartridges on him (this fact was proved by his lawyers) and sentenced to three years and seven months imprisonment. The prominent Ukrainian journalist, Crimean Mykola Semen, was persecuted by the invaders for "separatism" - for the fact that he called the Crimea Ukrainian territory in his articles. Two members of the editorial board of Sevastopol magazine "Black Sea Security", Dmitry Shtiblikov and Olexii Bessarabov, were arrested by the FSB of Russia in November 2016 for falsified indictment of preparation of sabotage allegedly for the tasks of Ukrainian military intelligence. Another "saboteur", Olexiy Stogniy, owner of a small stationery and children's toys store in Sevastopol, was imprisoned for 3.5 years, but not for "preparing sabotage", what he was initially accused of, but of "illegal possession of weapons" which was planted on him after detention. Ukrainian Evgeniy Panov was also detained as a "Ukrainian saboteur", but no evidences of "sabotage" were provided by investigation.
Many detainees have been in inhumane conditions in prisons for more than a year. On August 12, 2017, the FSB of Russia found one more "Ukrainian saboteur" in the Crimea, who was trying to either cut off, or destroy, or blow up the wooden pole of a certain transmission line. This version of the FSB would look funny and comical if it were not for a particular person who was forced to accept "guilt" under torture.
Many Ukrainian political prisoners in the Crimea were brutally tortured to force them to cooperate with the FSB. The film director Oleg Sentsov and Ukrainian activist Oleksandr Kolchenko did not enter into an agreement with the occupants and received 20 and 10 years of imprisonment, respectively. Russian authorities in the Crimea revived the methods of punitive psychiatry of the totalitarian Soviet period. Ilmi Umerov, one of the leaders of the Crimean Tatar people, is periodically subjected to "psychiatric examinations". One of the recent examples of Russia's cynical and inhumane actions in the Crimea was detention of 76-year-old Crimean Tatar activist Server Karametov. He went on an individual protest against the political persecution of his people. A man was sentenced to 10 days of imprisonment, ignoring his age and Parkinson's disease.
Lindner actually proposes this legal tyranny in the Crimea to "encapsulate for an indefinite time", too. Thousands of Crimeans were forced to leave the peninsula. Many of them can not go back because they will be repressed by the occupation authorities for their pro-Ukrainian stance.
In fact, Lindner is worried not about the problem of the Crimea, not about the problem of Russia's violation of human rights, not about a war that Russia runs explicitly and secretly in the Middle East and in Europe. "Security and well-being in Europe depend on, among other things, relations with Moscow," Lindner says in one of his interviews. Obviously, he is worried about restoring the "business as usual" with Putin's Camarilla which steals from their own people. This money, stolen from millions of Russians and withdrawn from the Russian Federation through overseas banks, including German ones, is called "investments" in Germany. It is a pity that free democrats end up where the money of the Kremlin kleptocracy begins.
By "Encapsulating the problem of the Crimea indefinitely," Lindner and the like create thereby an additional incentive for continuation of Russian expansion, send an encouraging signal to the Kremlin. It will not be read there so, as it is seen in Berlin. This position will be judged by the Kremlin as weakness of Germany, weakness of Europe and as own strength and confidence in the fact that it is possible to continue unpunished the expansionist policy, and violate human rights. They say, the West will express indignation a little, but in the future they will propose to "encapsulate" the problem and to continue "nur geschaft", because money does not smell of the blood of victims, of tortures of the arrested, of sufferings of their relatives, of humiliation and fear of the Crimean Tatars to lose their homeland again.
Offering the idea of "encapsulating the Crimea problem" for the benefit of cooperation with Russia, which is openly pursuing a policy of destroying Europe from the inside, Lindner sells the soul of German free democracy to Mephistopheles of modern totalitarianism in the face of Putin's kleptocracy, which has chosen the path of aggression and annexations. Allowing Putin to save his face by "encapsulating" the Crimea problem, and thus humiliating Ukrainians who defend their independence in the fight against the aggressor, means that the concepts of "freedom" and "democracy" are no longer a value for those who call themselves "free democrats" in modernized shroderized Germany.
Ukrainians do not give up the values that are called European ones. We do not trade in freedom, democracy and human rights. The two revolutions, the 2004 Orange and the 2014 Dignity ones, confirm this.
I do not know whether Lindner read the German "Putin connoisseur" Boris Reittsshutter, a book of the writer Karl Schlegel about Ukraine, the publication of Andreas Umland about Russia and Russian aggression against Ukraine, or even the recent article of the well-known journalist Gerhard Gnauck about the "Russian complex" of the German elites. Lindner is interested, considering all this, in quite different things. If he becomes the new foreign minister of Germany, the Kremlin will pop some champagne, and possibly vodka.
P.S. The heartfelt presidential speech at the military parade on the occasion of the 26th anniversary of independence contained only one mention of the Crimea. And there was no word about Russia's repression in the occupied territory, about the Crimean prisoners of the Kremlin. Neither last year, nor for 8 months of 2017, the president has not found time to meet with their relatives. Unlike the EU Ambassador to Ukraine, who found time in his schedule during the month. This approach of Bankova to the Crimea is one of the reasons why the ideas of its "encapsulating" are generated and their followers appear. They do not see the proper diplomatic activity of Kyiv, but they see the "Crimean amnesia" of state power.
