RFE/RL’s Robert Coalson recently went to Crimea and spoke to members of the pro-Russian separatist movement there. One politician he spoke to had the novel idea of leasing Crimea to Russia in exchange for a cancellation of Ukraine’s debt to Moscow. But what would happen after the lease expired? “After 99 years, I don’t think Ukraine will last that long as an independent country,” Valery Podyachy, head of a group called the Popular Front, told Coalson. “Russia will exist because Russia is after all a leading global player on a par with the United States, China, and the European Union. So it is obvious that Russia will exist. But will Ukraine exist…? That’s why, in principle, this solution would satisfy everyone.”

Other politicians have expressed similar hopes. Volodymyr Konstantinov, the speaker of Crimea’s parliament, recently told lawmakers that the region may well secede if Ukraine’s tensions begin to pull it apart. The parliament has also suggested that the region’s constitution be amended to list Russia as the “guarantor” of Crimea’s autonomy.

The situation is complicated by the fact that many Russians view Crimea as part of Russia: one recent poll found that 56 percent of Russians view Crimea as a Russian territory – a far larger percentage than the number who viewed Chechnya, inside Russian federation borders, as part of Russia (39 percent). A few days ago, a Russian official told the Financial Times that if Ukraine began to get more chaotic, they would step in to protect the ethnic Russians and the Russian navy base on the peninsula. “If Ukraine breaks apart, it will trigger a war,” the unnamed official told the newspaper. “They will lose Crimea first [because] we will go in and protect [it], just as we did in Georgia.” (Whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would really want to set that precedent is unclear, however – Alexander Motyl, a professor at Rutgers University and an expert on Ukrainian affairs, recently argued that it would put Putin’s grand plans for a “Eurasian Union” at risk.)