Sure, that’s what Trump says. What’s going on is that Putin wants 25% cut in US military funding, to make Russian aggression more affordable.
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Perhaps annexing Crimea was more affordable than building a new naval base.
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I never said that it would. I was just giving my thoughts as to why Sevastopol is considered to be so important as a naval base, and why it figures so highly in strategic planning on all sides. It’s the best deep-water port in the Black sea, and control of that port is a key factor in control of that sea.
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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”.
Also the Sea of Azov is very shallow. Wiki gives a mean depth of 7m (23 ft). It is too shallow for most warships.
A couple of years ago some US politician suggested sending a couple of Arleigh Burke class destroyers into the Sea of Azov as a show of force/show of support for Ukraine. Duh. An Arleigh Burke class has a 9.3m (30 ft) draft
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Not really. I think Russia actually had a long-term plan to build a new naval base on the Krasnodar peninsula near Anapa or Novorossick. It was the threat of NATO in the Crimea that seems to have precipitated the decision.
The term you’re looking for is “Autonomous Republic of Crimea”.
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I suspect you are correct. Crimea seems to have had more than one designation over the years and I did not check. Thanks
Presumably you’d blame the (two) Chechen wars on Islamists,
Why? I have no idea what started the wars. It’s nothing I have ever looked into.
but I’d be interested to hear the Russian version of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War
So would I. I often get the impression that the Caucasus are a snake-pit of contenting groups but I have never read a really coherent discussion pro–Russia or pro–Georgian or neutral about the confrontation.
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