Actual Results of Crimean Secession Vote Leaked 557
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes reported on Monday that The President of Russia's Council on Civil Society and Human Rights very briefly and supposedly by accident posted the actual results of the Crimean secession vote. According to the blog post, which has since been taken down, only 30% of Crimeans participated in the vote instead of the 83% participation officially advertised by Russia, and of that 30% only half voted for secession, which means that 15% of all Crimeans voted for secession rather than the 82% officially reported by Russia. There is no way for this claim to be verified as no foreign observers were allowed during the voting process. The vote is reportedly being conducted again during the 'May 11 referendum on the status of the so-called People's Republic of Donetsk.'" We've had a lot of discussion over the years about election methods and transparency; it would be interesting to hear from Ukranian readers in particular on this topic.
History lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
Joseph Stalin
Sounds like Putin has studied history.
Re:well (Score:0, Interesting)
In Putin's Crimea chad hangs you!
Putin is the new Hitler.
Hitler started with arming himself, Putin started by disarming Ukraine (Ukraine had loads of nuclear weapons before they stupidly let Putin take them away)
Hitler became very popular through tyranny, Putin became very popular by presenting himself as the Russian Chuck Norris.
Hitler could not care less about his own people, Putin puts his opponents in prison and gulachs.
Hitler invaded Poland, Putin invaded Ukraine
Putin's next step will be to "liberate" more parts of the former Soviet Union. He is a world-class terrorist that needs to be dealt with the same way as Osama Bin Laden.
Forbes NOT reporting (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an op-ed column, not a news article. Many news organization disclaim all fact-checking on op-eds; I don't know Forbes' specific policy.
Re:Again? (Score:4, Interesting)
First, any public poll with close to 90% outcome should be suspect.
There are 10% Crimean Tatar and 25% Ukrainian nationals in the Crimea, that makes Putin's figures unbelievable.
And even people who identify with Russia do not necessarily all want to actually join it under Putin's regime.
This is quite right. I'm an American and I've spent a grand total of several months in Ukraine in the first half of the decade of the 2000s. I can speak Russian well. I was by pure luck, not by plan, on the ground in Ukraine while the Orange Revolution of 2004 was happening and I saw if first hand. What was just amazing at the time is how insanely bad the Russians and their Ukrainian lackeys are at cheating in elections. In 2004 some of the oblasts (this is something like a state or region) reported vote totals approaching 100% for the entire state for Yanukovich. I had no doubt that Yanukovich easily won his home oblast, but the 98% in favor of him reported in the first (later thrown out) voting was just absurd. Other regions came out with equally absurd totals, such as Odessa with something like 90%. I believe that Yanukovich truly won every oblast he was said to have won in the original 2004 elections, but none of them were won with the vote totals reported. The Russians and their Ukrainian lackeys like to report huge super majorities in their favor and no sane person believes the vote totals reported.
Re:Again? (Score:3, Interesting)
From what I heard from my relatives in Simferopol, even the Crimean Tatars lined up to vote "for Putin" and now that Russian passports are starting to be issued the Tatars are the first in line to get them. It's quite telling that even most of the Tatars choose Russia as the lesser evil.
And from what I can tell by living the first part of my life there and regularly visiting my friends and relatives, the general populace is really fed up with the Ukrainian government and, if old enough, reminisce about and miss the Soviet days, which now translates to longing for reunion with Russia.
It is really bizarre to us (ethnic Russians from/living in Simferopol, Crimea) how thoroughly the western media misses the fact that most Crimeans really want to join Russia or at least part from Ukraine.
Re:well (Score:4, Interesting)
You might want to look at the demographics [wikipedia.org] of the Ukraine. The Russian speaking percentage is 30%. The Ukrainian speaking percentage is 67%. So the less than 1/3 Russian speaking portion is nowhere near half.
The thing in Ukraine is that most people there are actually bilingual [wikipedia.org], so what numbers you get depends on what questions you ask. If the question is "what language do you consider native", you'll get numbers like the ones that you've quoted. If you instead ask "what language do you speak at home", then around 45% say that they use Russian [wikipedia.org] (so a bunch of people consider Ukrainian native, but use Russian day-to-day, including private conversations). If you ask "what language do you speak most of the time" (i.e. including work, official communication, and other communication outside of home), then Russian becomes dominant nationally, and in most regions except for the western ones.
So it's technically true that "most of Ukraine is Ukrainian speakers". It is also true, at the same time, that most of Ukraine is Russian speakers :) the country is often compared to Canada with its language issue, but the situation in Ukraine is radically different from that in Canada because there are no clear geographic borders defining language use, and language affiliation only weakly correlates with national self-identification and other political questions (case in point: the majority of people on Maidan spoke Russian).
. The only thing close to a rights issue was a bill to make Ukrainian the only official language.
Not quite. That thing that you speak of was an attempt to repeal a law, enacted under Yanukovich, that created a special category called "regional languages", with recognized official status on the territories of regions where their speakers constituted a minority above a certain threshold (it was still up to the regions to take up that opportunity or not) - it did not say anything about the official national/state language, however. It was clearly aimed at Russian, but in practice it was also used by e.g. Hungarian speakers in Transcarpathia. That said, it's a poorly written law because it has many vague definitions, and because it doesn't define the lowest level of territorial division on which it applies - so there were cases of e.g. individual villages declaring their own regional language (examples included Russian, Hungarian, Roma, Bulgarian, Tatar etc) - while the larger entity of which they are a part of did not do so. Needless to say, at some point it makes quite a mess, administratively speaking.
So the idea was to repeal that law, and then enact a new law on languages. However, the president vetoed the repeal because it was seen as politically inappropriate at the time (as many russophones took the repeal as an assault on their language rights).