Lithuania continues to refuse acknowledgment of Crimean Annexation

  • 2015-05-07
  • By George East

VILNIUS - In a meeting on April 27 at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York, Permanent Representative of Lithuania to the UN, Ambassador Raimonda Murmokaite, met with Chairman Refat Chubarov of the Crimean Tatar Mejils.
She reiterated that Lithuania would continue its stance of not recognising the Crimea as part of Russia, after the Russian annexation of the peninsula which took place on March 18 2014.
Mejils, who is taking part in the 14th session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigeneous Issues (UNFPII), thanked Lithuania for its stance on protecting Tatar rights.

It is estimated that Crimean Tatars constitute around 12 per cent of Crimea’s population of an estimate 2.4 million.
Murmokaite stressed the need for the international community to maintain its attention on human rights - particularly the situation of the Tatars.
On the day of the Crimean annexation, the pro-Russian government announced that Crimean Tatars would be required to relinquish coastal lands on which they resided since the early 1990s when they returned to the area in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.

The government described they would need the land for “social purposes”, since the Crimean Tatars did not hold the appropriate legal documents.
In the immediate aftermath of the Crimean annexation, a meeting of the Crimean Tatars’ representative body, the Kurtulai, held a meeting and voted in favour of “ethnic and territorial autonomy” using “political and legal” means.
The decision as to whether they will accept Russian passports, or  will gain autonomy within Russia or Ukraine has been deferred to date.

Like Lithuania, its Baltic neighbours Latvia and Estonia, also refuse to acknowledge Crimea as part of Russia.
Of the 28 European Union’s member states, only Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, resisted the European Commission’s decision to deny Schengen visas to Crimean residents who have Russian passports.