This week, a possible candidate for the presidency of Russia, Ksenia Sobchak, stated that the problem of the annexed Crimea should be decided in a new referendum. Russian financier and blogger Slava Rabinovich told "Apostrophe" why the peninsula is recognized as Ukrainian even on the Kremlin's website and for what reason it can not be such a referendum.

I have a certain negative attitude towards the nomination of Ksenia Sobchak as a candidate for the presidency, because she, voluntarily or not at all, participates to some extent in the special operation to legitimize Vladimir Putin's inauguration. Here she plays a definitely assigned role. Or she understands this perfectly and specifically participates on the instructions of the Kremlin administration. Or she understands this perfectly and participates on her behalf not on the instructions of the Kremlin administration. Anyway, she understands this, because I have always considered her and consider him an intelligent person. And she can not understand, even if she does not do it on her instructions.

But, on the other hand, one must be fair to it. Yes, she immediately stated that Crimea is not Russian by international law. At the same time, she never said otherwise, because for other wording, she might have been prosecuted. She has a problem and for these words. As far as I heard, the Prosecutor General's Office launched some sort of check on what she said.

I have repeatedly spoken publicly about the full scope of international treaties and laws that Russia has violated. By the way, all of them are still in effect, they have not been terminated by Russia, including the Budapest Memorandum and not only, including the Treaty on Peace, Friendship and Cooperation between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, including the Treaty on the Russian-Ukrainian Border, ratified under Putin is still hanging on the Kremlin's website, clearly designates Crimea as Ukrainian and guarantees the territorial integrity of both states - what is it to discuss?.

And as for the decision of the Crimeans, here is an absolutely obvious, unconditional black and white picture of what the law says. Crimea, being the territory of the Ukrainian state, lives according to the laws of the Ukrainian state, including the Constitution of Ukraine, which does not imply local referendums in any parts of the country. Accordingly, any kind of referendum can only be an all-Ukrainian.

On the same principle, it is possible not only to cite examples of different analogies with referendums that have long been nagging, for example, in Kaliningrad, Tatarstan, Chechnya, Karelia, and so on. You can, in fact, give examples that ethnic Russians live in Canada. But this does not give them the right to unite in some of the most populated ethnic Russian provinces and demand a referendum for secession from Canada.

Ethnic Russians have long had their own national state, which is called the Russian Federation, regardless of where they live - in Canada, France Australia or the Crimea. They do not have the right to establish their national state in these countries and parts of the world, because they already have their own separate ethnic state. They self-determined. Therefore, the right of a nation to self-determination, even under the aegis of the United Nations, has absolutely nothing to do with the Crimean problem, because those who lived in the Crimea at the end of 2013 could safely emigrate to Russia.