Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Why Catalonia Will Fail Where Crimea Succeeded

The Spanish region's referendum is just as illegitimate, but it has less practical ability to secede.

October 4, 2017 at 1:22 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Passionate but weak.
Photographer: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

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There are good reasons why the Russian propaganda machine backed Sunday's Catalan referendum and the Ukrainian foreign ministry denounced it " as "illegitimate." The Catalan situation draws comparisons with that in Crimea in 2014, and they are not as easy to dismiss as Catalan independence supporters might think.

To discuss the similarities, let's first get the one glaring dissimilarity out of the way. In March 2014, the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was full of Russian troops, both in and out of uniform. Days after a revolution in Ukraine brought down the government of President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia's "little green men," as the unmarked Russian soldiers were called, seized Crimea's local parliament and installed a local pro-Russian politician, Sergei Aksyonov, as the region's prime minister.