by Marcus Papadopoulos

FRANCE’S most senior diplomat said last week that the Russian government is issuing passports to residents of the Crimea, a peninsula in southern Ukraine.

In an interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said: “We all know that they are handing out Russian passports over there [Crimea].” Mr Kouchner warned that consequently a “danger exists” that Russia might intervene in the Crimea as it did in South Ossetia this summer.

However, Mr Kouchner added that during recent talks with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev, he did not get the impression that the Kremlin would directly involve itself in Crimea’s internal affairs.

In 1954, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev transferred the Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav of 1654 which unified Russia and Ukraine.

During the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991 the status of Crimea became a major cause of tension between Russia and Ukraine, where the overwhelming majority of the population – 77 per cent – is Russian-speaking.

The Crimean population was seeking independence from Kiev and unification with Russia. And the peninsula was a hugely important area for the Russian military as its Black Sea Fleet was, and still is, based at Sevastopol.

Tension between Moscow and Kiev was, however, temporarily defused as a result of the Treaty on Friendship, Co-operation and Partnership signed in 1997, which permitted the Russian Black Sea Fleet to stay on at Sevastopol for 20 years and guaranteed the Ukrainian-Russian frontier.

However, with the pro-Western government of President Viktor Yushchenko making joining Nato a priority, the Crimea is now a potential flashpoint again between Kiev and Moscow.

In a repeat of what the Kremlin did in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the early 1990s, it is believed that 100,000 Crimean residents have already obtained Russian passports.

The success of Russia’s intervention in South Ossetia has encouraged the Russian elite to view the issuing of Russian passports as one of the most effective ways of maintaining its dominance in the former Soviet territory.