Crimea starts gathering signatures in support of referendum to secede from Ukraine
This news story first came out 30 years ago to the day, and we are publishing it today as part of Interfax's project, "Timeline of the Last Days of USSR. This Day 30 Years Ago." The project's goal is to reconstruct as fully as possible the timeline of the last few months of 1991 and to give everyone interested in understanding the historical processes of that period the opportunity to study and analyze the events that led to and accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the new Russian state. The complete timeline can be found in Russian.
SIMFEROPOL. Dec 24 (Interfax) – Activists of the Crimea Republican Movement and the People's Opposition bloc have started gathering signatures in support of an urgent referendum on Crimea's secession from Ukraine.
The public initiative group behind this action proposed at a meeting to include the following question on ballot papers: "Do you support declaring Crimea an independent republic in a union with other sovereign states?"