Domestic Politics in Crimea, 2009-2015

Crimea’s annexation to Russia was the result of the interaction between Crimean leaders and the Kremlin, so we should pay more attention to Crimea’s domestic politics in the period before this event. To make Crimea a bastion for his victory in the 2010 presidential election, Viktor Yanukovych dispatched Vasily Dzharty, former mayor of Makeevka (Donetsk Oblast), as Party of Regions electoral curator of Crimea. Before and after the 2010 presidential election, Dzharty’s team liquidated Crimea’s consociational democracy to build a more effective government and reliable electoral machine. Humiliated Crimean indigenous elites nicknamed Dzharty’s team the “Macedonians,” but accepted their leadership as long as they secured Yanukovych’s victory and subsequently pumped abundant subsidies from Kyiv into developing Crimea. The Euromaidan Revolution brought to the surface the potential tension between the Macedonians and indigenous Crimean elites. The Macedonians, headed by the late Dzharty’s successor, Crimea’s prime minister Anatoly Mogilev, found it possible to cooperate with the newly born Euromaidan government. The Crimean elites rejected this idea and removed Mogilev from his post to ask Russia for military help.