Recently, the Crimean “press,” including aggressor-controlled channels and aggregators, suddenly decided to “talk about the Khazars” and retrieve a collection of anti-Semitic clichés from a rather dusty closet.
Moreover, these “researchers of racial purity” from the “Russian world” decided to classify among the “Khazars” not only Ukrainian nationalists, but also “many European Jews,” as well as “Karaites and Krymchak Jews,” also claiming that “the Middle Eastern origins of the Jewish people are a myth invented to create the state of Israel.”
The aforementioned “Kremlin-style” Nazis also decided to galvanize the story of the so-called “Crimean Jewish autonomy” from the “Joint” organization, along with the so-called “Crimean California project,” claiming that in 1943, “the Americans demanded Crimea’s secession from the USSR, hoping to buy the peninsula… just as they bought Alaska in 1867.”
It should be noted that this conspiracy theory has previously been repeatedly debunked by researchers from various countries, including those who can hardly be accused of sympathizing with modern-day Israel: documents and facts irrefutably demonstrate that Stalin’s empire, like the United States, had no real plans to settle Jews in Crimea during or after World War II.
But this fable’s metastases in Kremlin-controlled territory are emerging in the most unexpected places. It’s enough to point out that in October 2023, crowds of pogromists in Khasavyurt and Makhachkala airport searched among the passengers of the ill-fated flight from Tel Aviv for “Jews from Israel who had come to resettle in Crimea” in order to lynch them.
And now the aforementioned Crimean propagandists of “racial purity” have decided to spread the story that, supposedly in independent Ukraine, “the topic of Jewish Crimea has resurfaced with renewed vigor,” and that the very same “Joint” allegedly financed a project to “establish an American military base in Crimea with the gradual transfer of the peninsula under US jurisdiction.”
This “creative development” of the anti-Semitic fable about the “Crimean California project,” once originated by Pavel Sudoplatov and previously promoted by Sevastopol naval propagandists Sergei Usov and Sergei Gorbachev, Russian Minister Mikhail Poltoranin, and Crimean Tatar collaborator Lentun Bezaziyev, has suddenly appeared in current Crimean propaganda for good reason.
The day before, on May 18, the President of Ukraine stated that “we have unfortunately documented attempts to organize the export of grain from the temporarily occupied territory of Crimea, as well as other economic exploitation of the peninsula involving entities from the United States. We will inform our partners.”
And now, in response, Russian intelligence agencies are launching a classic “information operation” to distort both American activities and Crimean realities, drizzling it, in their traditional style, with musty anti-Semitic sauce.
