THE CRIMEAN TATAR FACTOR AS A MEANS OF PSEUDOLEGITIMIZATION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION’S ENCRUENCES ON THE TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY OF UKRAINE

The article, based on the coverage of the process of the formation of the Crimean Tatars as an independent national community, analyzes the possibilities of recognizing them as an indigenous people and granting them the right to national-state self-determination, as well as the peculiarities of using this factor for pseudo-legitimization of changes in the status of Crimea by pro-Russian forces. The recognition of the Crimean Tatars as an indigenous people has taken a long political and historical path. However, even under such conditions, their realization of the right to national-state self-determination must be consistent with the content of the constitutional principle of unitarism and be carried out through the forms of direct democracy provided for by the law. Representatives of the authorities of the Russian Federation do not have any legal grounds to justify the illegal annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in February-March at the expense of the Crimean Tatar factor. The provisions on the Crimean Tatars' realization of the right to national-state self-determination were widely used by representatives of the separatist political elite of Crimea to hide their real intentions during the illegal annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea as an integral part of Ukraine in February — March 2014. According to the author, an indigenous people is a stable national community, whose representatives live compactly on the territory of a single historical homeland and are characterized by the presence of a common culture, language, religion and other factors that distinguish it from other such communities, including the formation of its own state traditions. At the same time, it should be taken into account that the mechanism for the realization of the right to national-state self-determination by the indigenous people must be connected with the expression of the will of the population of the relevant territory to exercise it through the forms of direct democracy provided for by the law. The activities of the Kurultay and Mejlis were always aimed at opposing the autocratic policy of assimilation of indigenous national communities with the aim of forming an ethnically homogeneous population that would not be able to endanger the smooth functioning of the imperial state mechanism.