Mr. Speaker, I am not sure I can provide as much useful commentary as I would wish to this very interesting question. I would say something, though, about the Crimean situation. It is an idea of the kinds of complexities that can occur. For what it is worth, by the way, I have a Ukrainian Jewish ancestor; my great-grandfather came from Ukraine and went to Russia and Poland in the early decades of the 20th century before the Russian revolution, and later on emigrated to Canada and thereby spared his descendants the Holocaust, which came about 20 years after that.
I would just observe that this is the kind of difficulty we can have. The Crimea in particular, which is the focal point of this, not only has strategic importance because Sevastopol is a naval port, but also has an ethnic mix that contains some Jews there as well, though it is a very small population. Also, my favourite Russian Jewish author, Isaac Babel, wrote the Sevastopol stories and they are well worth reading.
There is a Russian population; we are told it is a 60% majority. There is a Ukrainian population in the Crimea, as well as the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim group descended from the Mongols, who have lived in Crimea for their entire history and who were rounded up and sent away by Stalin to central Asia, deported with what I assume was permanent intent but allowed to return in decades since that time. Now one of the fundamental issues in Crimea is the issue of who has what land, given that it was redistributed from the Tatars to Russians long enough ago in the past that it is unclear how one could resettle the Tatars in their rightful lands without disrupting Russians. This is the kind of vexed problem one sees by parallel with countries like Israel and the other countries in the Middle East where populations have been deported. It is unfortunately one of the consequences of mass non-voluntary population movements.