Crimea Referendum Raises Hopes, Tensions

A referendum in Crimea on joining Russia announced for this month was welcomed by many in the peninsula Wednesday but looks set to hamper Western hopes of keeping Ukraine together.

While some Crimea residents would see rejoining Russia as a return to the region's rightful status, experts say the vote on March 16 could draw out the military stand-off and make it very hard to broker a diplomatic solution.

With pro-Russian forces in de-facto control of Crimea, life in the capital Simferopol has been relatively undisturbed, despite Russian flags appearing above some government buildings and transmissions from two local Ukrainian TV stations being switched for a Russian channel.

But discontent lingers under the surface and some yearn for the perceived certainties of the Soviet era.

"I lived under the USSR and at that time, we wanted for nothing. Now there are no more jobs, no more wages. We have nothing any more," said one woman, Natasha.

Another local, Yuri, wanted to shake off what he saw as excessive Ukrainian influence in Crimea.

"Since 1991, there has been a kind of Ukrainization -- little by little, we have been forced to learn Ukrainian. But I don't want the Ukrainian language," he said.

Crimea was part of Russia from the late 18th century until Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gifted it to Ukraine in 1954.

It still has a majority of ethnic Russians and many people use the Russian language instead of Ukrainian.

Crimea's Moscow-backed leaders seemed to see the outcome of the referendum as a foregone conclusion after they announced the poll date and voted to ask Russia to consider a request for the region to be Kremlin-ruled.

On his Facebook page, Crimean deputy premier Rustam Temirgaliev wrote: "Just now the government of Crimea took a historic decision to join the Russian Federation."

The two questions which will be posed in the referendum imply a break from Kiev.

In the first, residents will be asked whether they want to become part of Russia as a subject of the federation, officials said.

The second will ask whether Crimea should have increased autonomy, returning to the de facto independence it enjoyed under a previous constitution in 1992.

The referendum announcement has prompted a furious response from Kiev and the United States.

Ukraine's interim prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk called the move "illegitimate" while a U.S. official told reporters that "any decision about Crimea needs to be made by the government in Kiev".

The leader of Crimea's Tatars -- deported from Ukraine under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and only returning after the fall of the Soviet Union -- urged a referendum "boycott".

"In a situation when there are troops out in the streets and there is an absolute legal bacchanalia, the announcement of any referendum, in the absence of any legislation, is a step that would further destabilize the situation in Crimea," Refat Chubarov said on Crimean Tatar ATR TV.

Andy Hunder, head of the London-based Ukrainian Institute, said he saw the result of the referendum as "pretty much a given."

"It looks like they (Russia) want to do this as soon as possible as part of a bigger plan to continue their military intervention in Crimea," he told Agence France Presse.

Gerhard Mangott, a Russia and central Europe expert at Austria's Innsbruck University, added it was "difficult to envisage a diplomatic solution" following a likely yes vote.

"This referendum will very certainly be rejected by the West, the European Union and the United States," he said.