Intercultural relations in Russian Crimea: Empirical testing of three hypotheses of intercultural relations Ekaterina Kodja Nadezhda Lebedeva Tatiana Ryabichenko Introduction The study examines intercultural relations in Crimea - one of the multicultural regions of Russia. Russians constitute the ethnic majority in Crimea (about 68%), the most numerous ethnic minorities are Ukrainians (about 16%) and Crimean Tatars - about 10% (according to the results of the census in the Crimean Federal district, 2015). The character of interethnic relations in Crimea has been influenced by the historical, political, and socio-economic challenges of recent decades. One of these challenges was the events of 2014 were - a massive social and political transformation, accompanied by a change in the status of ethnic groups and increased tension in interethnic relations. The unique socio-cultural context of the Crimea opens wide provides big opportunities for the research on interethnic interaction. The current study is aimed at testing three hypotheses of intercultural relations: the multiculturalism hypothesis, the integration hypothesis, and the contact hypothesis. Three hypotheses of intercultural relations originate in empirical studies of Canadian multiculturalism policy (Berry, 1984) and were later tested in many countries. The multiculturalism hypothesis states that confidence in one's identity based on a sense of security decreases discrimination and promotes the acceptance of people of different cultures (Ward, Masgoret, 2008; Lebedeva, Tatarko, 2017; Galyapina, Lepshokova, 2017). The contact hypothesis states that under certain conditions (equality of individuals or groups; voluntary contact; support of intercultural contacts by social norms, etc.), intercultural contacts promote mutual acceptance (Tropp, Pettigrew, 2005; Ryabichenko, Lebedeva, 2017; Lepshokova, 2017). The integration hypothesis states that the involvement of individuals both in the maintenance of their distinctive cultures and in the life of a larger society leads to greater psychological well-being than participation in the life of only one cultural group (Abu Raaya, Sam, 2017; Berry, Hou, 2016; Intercultural relations in the post-Soviet space, 2017). Figure 1 shows a theoretical model to test three hypotheses of intercultural relations.