Representatives of 175 nationalities live in Crimea, with Russians accounting for almost 70% of the total population of the peninsula, according to the preliminary results of the population census.
“Population census is the only source of information on the nationalities, citizenship and language of the population,” Kryminform News Agency quotes Svetlana Nikitina, head of the Department of the Population and Healthcare of Rosstat (the Russian Federal State Statistics Service), as saying.
“During the census, the question about the nationality was asked strictly in the way indicated in the questionnaire and the answers were registered as told to census takers. The census takers were banned from asking leading questions or correcting the answers,” Nikitina says.
The vast majority of the peninsula population are Russians (1.49 million people or 68% of total), including 1.19 million people (65%) live in the Republic of Crimea and 303.1 thousand people (81%) in Sevastopol. Ukrainians account for 15.7% of the total population. Almost 344.5 thousand Ukrainians live in Crimea. The third group is the Crimean Tatars (232.3 thousand people or 10.6% of the total population).
Another 45,000 people (2%) call themselves Tatars without mentioning the word “Crimean.” “During the final calculation these groups will be united,” Nikitina says.
Representatives of other nationalities in Crimea account for up to 4% of the total population each. Most of them are Byelorussians (21.7 thousand or 1%) and Armenians (11 thousand or 0.2%). National groups of 1000-5000 Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Moldavians, Jews, Koreans, Greeks, the Polish, Gypsies, the Chuvash, Bulgarians, Germans, Mordovians, Georgians, and Turks reside in Crimea. The national groups with less than 1000 people are Tajiks, the Mari, Bashkirians, Udmurts, Ossetians, Kazakhs, and Arabs. The census revealed also 535 Karaites and 228 Krymchaks in the peninsula.
The all-Crimean census was held in the Republic of Crimea and in Sevastopol in the period from October 14-25, 2014. The census registered almost 2.4 million people residing in the peninsula.