Costs potentially huge in Ukrainian power struggle

IN HIS 1979 novel The Island of Crimea, Vasily Aksyonov imagined the region’s flourishing independence from the Soviet Union.

Aksyonov, a dissident writer who emigrated to America shortly after the book’s samizdat (underground) publication, is now lauded as a prophet. But his prophecy has been turned on its head: Today’s Crimea does not want independence from Ukraine; it wants continued dependence on Russia.

Traditionally the gem in the imperial crown, a lavish playground of czars and Soviet commissars — and, more importantly, the home of the Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet — Crimea became part of Ukraine under Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian president Boris Yeltsin apparently forgot to claim it back, so Ukraine kept a territory in which nearly 60% of the 2m inhabitants identify as Russians.