Asian tyrannies, from China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey to the "Muslim Brotherhood" and Hamas, think in terms of land, religion, blood and eternity. And they see right through the West
After meeting with Erdogan in Ankara, Zelensky announced that the Turkish president considers Crimea "Ukrainian". Western media were touched by the "firm position" of the Turkish leader and his support for the "collective democratic West" in opposing the Russian invasion.
Thus, the “collective West”, like Zelensky, has once again demonstrated that they understand absolutely nothing: neither the very nature of Eurasian regimes, nor Erdogan’s true intentions.
Because Erdogan does not consider Crimea to be either “Russian” or “Ukrainian”. He considers it Turkish exclusively.
For at least 15 years, maps of the Neo-Ottoman Empire have been published in Turkey.
In 2021, for example, the TGRT TV channel, which is close to Erdogan, showed a map with Crimea and Donbass in Turkey's sphere of influence. Turkish “sphere of influence” included also Armenia, Georgia, Greece, the southern regions of Russia, some territories of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and all Middle East. This map also appeared in other Turkish mass media, the Takvim daily newspaper and the Haber TV channel.
Crimea occupies a special place in these plans.
In Erdogan's eyes, Crimea is a territory illegally taken by Russia from the Ottoman Empire in the late 18th century, which must be returned to its successor, modern Turkey.
From the middle of the 15th century, there was an influential Crimean Khanate, a loyal vassal of the powerful Ottoman Porte. From here, swift and brutal raids were carried out on southeastern Europe, including not only the territory of today's Ukraine, but also Moldova, Russia itself and Poland. These raids were accompanied by the burning of cities and villages and the capture of masses of the Slavic population, which were sent to slave markets throughout the empire. However, after a series of defeats of the Ottoman Empire by Russia, in 1783 the Crimean Peninsula was annexed by Catherine the Great and proclaimed the "Tauride Governorate".
Crimean Tatars (now 12-13% of the population of Crimea), who survived persecution in the Russian Empire and especially the monstrous mass deportations under Stalin, are today closely connected with Turkey. Since the 1990s, Muslim Brothers and Salafis have been gaining ground here like Tablighi Jamaat и Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Every fifth representative of the community has a positive attitude towards the idea of creating a Sharia state.
Crimean Tatars were the only major ethnic group to boycott the 2014 referendum on Crimea's accession to Russia.
Erdogan supports the religious nationalism of the Crimean Tatars in every possible way, providing them with financial and political support through Turkish companies, investment projects, Islamic centers, cultural organizations, human rights societies. This is a Trojan horse that Erdogan believes will allow him to return Crimea to the future Neo-Ottoman Empire.
Turkey itself is home to 7-8 million Crimean Tatars who fled here since the early 19th century, and they are also being used by Erdogan for the covert conquest of Crimea.
The leader of the Crimean Tatars, Mustafa Dzhemilev, is a frequent and honored guest in Turkey: he is called Kyrym-oglu, or "son of Crimea." He likes to talk about the repatriation of all Crimean Tatars to their historical homeland.
Ankara constantly states that “Türkiye will not recognize the annexation of Crimea” (Speaker of the Turkish Parliament Mustafa Şentop, October 2022).
Erdogan, a master of political demagogy and intrigue, is well aware of the balance of power around the peninsula. The future of both Ukraine and Russia is more than unclear, but Ukraine, weak, torn apart by war, economically bled dry and not yet formed as a strong centralized state, is much more vulnerable. This means that in the long term it will be much easier to take Crimea away from Ukraine than from Russia, still a superpower that has repeatedly defeated the Ottomans.
And, as was said above, we are talking not only about Crimea, but also about almost all the states and lands that were once part of the Ottoman Porte.
The West, led by the US, with its short-term deals and "peace agreements" at any price and immediately, has catastrophically forgotten how to understand and calculate the nature of Asian nations. Western countries think in terms of "here and now". But the Asian tyrannies, from China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey to the "Muslim Brotherhood" and Hamas, think in terms of land, religion, blood and eternity. And they see right through the West.
Alexander Maistrovoy is the author of Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy (Notes of a Stranger), available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
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Alexander Maistrovoy is a graduate of Moscow Univ. in Journalism, worked there in his field and made aliyah in 1988. He works at the Russian language newspaper Novosty Nedely, has had articles posted on many internet sites and authored “Ways of God” about different religious and ethnic groups in the Holy Land, and with Mark Kotliarsky the Russian book Jewish Atlántida.
