But there's a bit more to this ethnic animosity, going further back.
The Mongol-Tatar Horde first arrived in what was then Rus'-Kyiv as conquerors in the mid-13th century. They were pretty ruthless colonizers (is there any other kind?). But the worst stage of this saga began when the Tatars combined forces with the Ottoman Empire in the mid-15th century and a slave-trade that would last 333 years (beginning in 1450 and ending in 1783) where Crimean Tatars conducted raids on a regular basis in Ukraine flourished. There were many sackings as well as an annual slave-hunt raid in which, over the years, millions of Ukrainian men, women and children were rounded up and sold into slavery.
The infamous "black roads" to slavery, which appear on 17th century maps of Ukraine, date to the early 15th century and were used for over three centuries to carry enslaved Ukrainians south toward Crimea and the slave markets at Constantinople and Kaffa where ships from Arabia, Turkey, Persia and Syria were docked to buy slaves.
So you see, there is some question as to whether Crimea should be actually be part of Ukraine at all. There is no love lost between these two. People in Crimea speak Russian or Tatar, not Ukrainian. Nevertheless, in 1954, the Soviet Union issued a decree transferring the Crimean Oblast from the USSR to the Ukrainian SSR. The Russians continue to maintain a strategic naval base there. The Russians loved to manipulate borders to dilute ethnicities and to discourage a sense of collective identity in the various ethnicities they dominated. As per the article, you can see that along with Ukrainians, Tatars suffered mightily under Stalin. In addition to the Ukrainian genocide, half the Tatar population in Crimea was wiped out and the rest were deported. Crimea is now considered an autonomous republic under Ukraine. I don't know that I would characterize the issue as a phenomenon of a "pro-Russian Ukrainian government." Both ethnic Russians and Ukrainians seem to share these sentiments. And yes, I would consider Crimea the ancestral homeland of the Tatars since they had occupied it so long and obviously love it enough to return. At least they should be given some land of their own...
Lately I've noticed, every radical seems to have a hankering for fish and chips. It's very wrong for them to be emigrating to the UK to do their evil deeds. I fear we'll be looking at more of this kind of thing. I'm half Ukrainian. I'm ashamed of these Ukie nutcases. Now I know what it feels like to be a non-radical Muslim.