That is why I said Weirdly enough. No one in their right mind is going to believe el Sisi’s results in Egypt.
It is not even clear that Crimea was an occupied territory in the sense that Iraq was in 2003 or Poland in 1940. There seems to have been little or no shooting, no seizures of key buildings, etc even when it was a face-off between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
There seems to have been cooperation between Russian forces and the Crimean Oblast government. Remember those official Russian forces were not invading—most or all of them lived there as part of the Russian naval forces[1]. Many of them would have been culturally and linguistically indistinguishable from Crimeans. Some may even have been Crimeans who chose to go with the Russian military rather that the Ukrainian when the USSR broke up.
At the time of the referendum, IIRC, the Ukrainian Government was breathing fire and there were neo-Nazi Ukrainian militias on the borders of the Crimean Oblast. Heck, reportedly Cossacks from the Krasnodar region were sending militia units to help defend Crimea!
The thought of a Ukrainian military occupation spearheaded by a mob of fascist nationalists might have made Russia look like a safe haven. This is particularly likely as something in the neighbourhood of 85% of the population was/is not ethnically Ukrainian and certainly would not speak Ukrainian as their first language if they spoke it at all.
I still find the referendum results weird but, given the circumstances, they may not be as crazy as they looked at first glance.
- I can just hear the orders for the Russian occupation; “Okay, Sergei and Ivan. You two are guarding the bus station . Catch the No. 6 bus down therej. Make sure you’re in proper uniform. And don’t forget your rifles this time”.
