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I’m very much afraid that, when seeing a correslation between Krimea and Cataluña, Spanish foreign affairs minister García-Margallo, along with many politicians and journalists, are all missing the point. Krimea’s present and past realities have nothing to do with Catalonia’s except for one thing: the referendum for independence is illegal. For the rest, Catalonia is not a region populated by a 97% of people sharing nothing with the country to which it belongs, whereas Krimea is. Equally, Catalonia is not a region artificially added to a country by political decisions totally foreign to its people’s will, while Krimea is. As a matter of fact, Krimea has never been Ukraine, whereas Catalonia has always been Spain. That’s why such presumed correlation is, to the best of my judgement, wholly mistaken: the real problem is not that Krimea wants its independence from Ukraine, but that Ukraine should have never become independent from Russia. So, we’d rather express the real correlation like this: Catalonia is not Ukraine’s Krimea, but Russia’s Ukraine.
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