US and NATO escalation of conflict with Russia is leading to war

[ForceFate]

This is just US fearmongering and fabricating fear

We saw this with Bush.

...until Crimea disappeared from Ukraine's maps...

 

[Thor]

...until Crimea disappeared from Ukraine's maps...

Crimea belongs to Russia, it should never have been given away without the people's concent.

 

[Sensorei]

...until Crimea disappeared from Ukraine's maps...

People seem to forget that Crimea chose to be integrated into the Russian Federation with 97% of voters choosing to join Russia in the 2014 referendum. Ukraine wouldn't accept that they'd been dumped and that their gf wanted her ex-bf back.

 

[ForceFate]

Crimea belongs to Russia, it should never have been given away without the people's concent.

How? Elaborate please.

 

[rambo919]

The funny thing is, this dance of Eastern European territories being integrated into and separated from central Russia has been happening for more than a millennium. Many of them having been originally created by peasant migrations away from the elite class of the time.

 

[ForceFate]

People seem to forget that Crimea chose to be integrated into the Russian Federation with 97% of voters choosing to join Russia in the 2014 referendum. Ukraine wouldn't accept that they'd been dumped and that their gf wanted her ex-bf back.

Explain the process. Isn't it supposed to go through parly first and ratified by the president? If this didn't happen, then do we not then question validity of this process? What does the constitution say? What were Russian soldiers doing there? I'm genuinely curious.


Edit: Was it not a bloodless coup? It's called soft coup I think.

 

[rietrot]

Explain the process. Isn't it supposed to go through parly first and ratified by the president? If this didn't happen, then do we not then question validity of this process? What does the constitution say? What were Russian soldiers doing there? I'm genuinely curious.


Edit: Was it not a bloodless coup? It's called soft coup I think.

It was ratified by the president.

 

[Cray]

If was ratified by the president.

Which president?

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-annexation-crimea-ratification/25304008.html

In a resolution on March 20, Ukraine's parliament said Kyiv will never recognize Russia's move.

The resolution said Ukraine "will never cease to fight for the liberation of Crimea as long and painful as this can be."

 

[rietrot]

Which president?

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-annexation-crimea-ratification/25304008.html

President Putin.

 

[Dave]

People seem to forget that Crimea chose to be integrated into the Russian Federation with 97% of voters choosing to join Russia in the 2014 referendum. Ukraine wouldn't accept that they'd been dumped and that their gf wanted her ex-bf back.

No they didn't, already shown to be incorrect earlier in the thread.

 

[ForceFate]

President Putin.

You're a troll

 

[Sensorei]

No they didn't, already shown to be incorrect earlier in the thread.

Nonsense, "shown" by US/UK propaganda driven Western Media. The numbers in the result of the referendum were not disputed. It was the validity of the referendum that was disputed due to the presence of Russian forces in Crimea. It's like Trump saying he lost due to electrion fraud. No real evidence.

The Crimean parliament had already voted to breakaway and join Russia before the referendum. The people wanted it. The West did not.

 

[Thor]

How? Elaborate please.

Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR).

 

[IndigoIdentity]

Always? That's not what I said.

No offense meant in what I had said as it was not directed at you. simply an observation relating to how the US always seems to be a victim and helpless against these foreign interventions within their electoral system.

 

[rambo919]

Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR).

And going back many centuries before that Russia initially forcibly annexed it before it changed hands several times to the point where the Ottoman Empire controlled it.

 

[IndigoIdentity]

Its a sad state of affairs. NATO and US are stirring a pot here trying to escalate matters into a war. Russia has legitimate concerns.

Should you ever speak frankly about the matters at hand, you are instantly demonized for it. Sad state of affairs indeed. Although the respect is indeed free which outweighs the cost of the alternatives, it sure as hell doesn't make as much money.

 

[hexagon]

People seem to forget that Crimea chose to be integrated into the Russian Federation with 97% of voters choosing to join Russia in the 2014 referendum. Ukraine wouldn't accept that they'd been dumped and that their gf wanted her ex-bf back.

Besides the official results, subsequent research by independent third-parties (Pew Center) established that 91% of Crimean citizens viewed the referendum as free and fair:
Crimea: People and Territory before and after Annexation
(Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottawa)

The Ukrainian government and the media, and to a large extent their Western counterparts, characterised separatism in Crimea as having minority support and the referendum as illegal and falsified. The separatism in the region was attributed mostly to direct military intervention by Russia. However, the analysis of various survey data indicates that support for separatism in Crimea increased significantly after the Euromaidan that resulted in the overthrow of the relatively pro-Russian government. There is no directly comparable and publicly available reliable survey data concerning popular support for separatism and joining Russia in Crimea after the Euromaidan. However, in a Pew Center survey in April 2014, 91 per cent of the respondents in Crimea stated that the referendum was free and fair (Pew Center, 2014).

Six years and $20 billion in Russian investment later, Crimeans are happy with Russian annexation
(Gerard Toal, John O’Loughlin and Kristin M. Bakke, Washington Post)

Our survey shows high levels of trust in Putin — though lower than in 2014.

By Gerard Toal, John O’Loughlin and Kristin M. Bakke
March 18, 2020

Wednesday is the sixth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. After a hastily organized and deeply contentious referendum on March 16, 2014, following Russia’s military occupation of the peninsula, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty of accession with Crimean leaders in Moscow two days later.

An avalanche of international criticism followed. Analysts pointed out that this was the first annexation by one state of the territory of a neighboring state on the European continent since World War II. In the United Nations, 100 countries condemned the unauthorized referendum and affirmed their support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

In Crimea itself, the annexation was popular, especially among Crimea’s large population of older ethnic Russians. More than five years later, and billions of rubles of investment later, it remains popular. Here’s what we found from surveys in December 2014 and December 2019.

Crimeans favored rejoining Russia
The conditions under which the March 2014 referendum in Crimea was conducted were far from ideal. Yet, most observers acknowledge that the majority, though certainly not all, of Crimeans supported the peninsula joining Russia (Russia’s government bans use of the word “annexation” to describe these events).

Numerous polls supported this conclusion. In December 2014, the Levada Center, Russia’s most reliable polling company, conducted a survey for us in Crimea that affirmed these findings. Our analysis of these survey results used the term “Crimea conundrum” to describe the disjuncture between the legitimacy of Crimea’s new status to most of its residents and its illegitimacy within the international community.

In 2020, after an estimated $20 billion in investment from Moscow and alignment with Russian infrastructure, have attitudes toward the annexation changed? The short answer is no. Crimea’s three largest ethnic groups are, by and in large, happy with the direction of events on the peninsula.

The December 2019 representative survey, also conducted by Levada, repeated many questions we asked five years earlier. Thus, we asked again about support for the annexation (we used “joining Russia” — a more neutral term) and how much people trusted specific political leaders.

Here’s what we found: Support for joining Russia remains very high (86 percent in 2014 and 82 percent in 2019) — and is especially high among ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. A key change since 2014 has been a significant increase in support by Tatars, a Turkic Muslim population that makes up about 12 percent of the Crimean population. In 2014, only 39 percent of this group viewed joining Russia as a positive move, but this figure rose to 58 percent in 2019.

Why are Crimean Tatars so hostile to Russia?

While Tatars still tend to be more negative about the Russian annexation than other nationalities, this growth is noteworthy, and we can track the more positive outlook among Tatars in other questions about expectations for the future and views on how Crimea has changed since 2014.

Tatars have been the focus of U.S. and Western complaints about human rights abuses on the peninsula, both by local authorities and by Moscow. At the same time, a growing acceptance of the new political reality matched with rising expectations of a more prosperous future appears to underlie the changing numbers that we see for this important minority population.

Which leaders do Crimeans trust?
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump told George Stephanopoulos of ABC that “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.” Trump’s critics charged him with using Vladimir Putin’s talking points. Yet Trump, in this instance, was broadly correct.

Crimeans, however, have little love for Trump — they show higher levels of trust in China’s leadership than they do in the U.S. president. As the figure below shows, only 3 percent said that they had a “lot of trust in President Trump” and only 12 percent went so far as “a little trust.” Three-quarters of the sample had “no trust at all” in Trump.

So much for Putin’s promise he’d abide by term limits. Here’s what’s happening.

What about Putin? Crimea’s trust in Putin, as might be expected, swamps those of external political leaders. This figure is down almost 20 percent from the 2014 figure for the highest support — the “trust a lot” bar, but these levels correspond to Putin’s overall support in Russia.

We did not name the Chinese leader in the survey, since pilot surveys showed a very low level of name recognition for Xi Jinping. These results show a high level of unfamiliarity about his government, with nearly 20 percent giving a “don’t know” answer and 41 percent declaring “no trust at all” for the Chinese government.

The Baltic analogy
Crimea’s annexation remains an outrage to most Euro-Atlantic states, though sentiments are clearly different on the political far right. But even Russia’s fiercest critics recognize, though they rarely express it publicly, that Crimea is not going to return to Ukraine any time soon.

The analogy these critics use is that of the Baltic States, whose occupation and incorporation into the Soviet Union was something the U.S. government never formally recognized. While this analogy resonates with the U.S.’s deep story of the Cold War as nations held captive by an evil empire, its vision of Crimea as “occupied territory” is out-of-sync with the material and attitudinal realities of contemporary Crimea.

Gerard Toal, professor of government and international affairs at Virginia Tech’s campus in Arlington, is the author of “Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest for Ukraine and the Caucasus” (Oxford University Press, 2019), which won the ENMISA Distinguished Book Award in 2019.

John O’Loughlin, college professor of distinction at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is a political geographer with research interests in the human outcomes of climate change in sub-Saharan Africa and in the geopolitical orientations of people in post-Soviet states.

Kristin M. Bakke is a professor of political science and international relations at University College London and associate research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Her current research focuses on postwar state-building and wartime legacies, as well as geopolitical orientations in post-Soviet states.

The authors acknowledge funding for this work from a joint National Science Foundation/Research Council UK grant (NSF award #1759645; ESRC award # ES/S005919/1).

To Russia With Love
The Majority of Crimeans Are Still Glad for Their Annexation
(John O'Loughlin, Gerard Toal, and Kristin M. Bakke, Foreign Affairs)

RT warning for those allergic:
How Crimea became part of Russia and why it was gifted to Ukraine

Kosovo, notably, seceded without a referendum: the decision to secede from Serbia was made by the 120-strong Assembly of Kosovo. See International recognition of Kosovo at Wikipedia.

 

[IndigoIdentity]

Explain the process. Isn't it supposed to go through parly first and ratified by the president? If this didn't happen, then do we not then question validity of this process? What does the constitution say? What were Russian soldiers doing there? I'm genuinely curious.


Edit: Was it not a bloodless coup? It's called soft coup I think.

If only such logic could be applied to the Maidan, but the lord knows that this would never happen.

The Ukrainians have always had divisions but but let us make no mistake, it is the foreign meddling that has pushed the situation over the edge and on to a civil war. The only people who have really lost out are the Ukrainians and I feel like many of them have come to the same realization and are really and truly unhappy about the way that things have turned out.

EDIT: I remember watching at the time, many of them looked genuinely happy, they truly thought that they would get a chance to become a part of the EU. In reality, all they got was shrugs and guns to have it out as pawns.

 

[Jet-Fighter7700]

so what are the chances this entire situation could end up in a Nuke war?
I mean USA and Russia have never seen Eye to eye, and this just feels like a continuation of old unresolved rivalries.

 

[ForceFate]

Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR).

If we're going that far back, then let's look at the peninsula before 1783. This was a bloodless coup...there's no other way to look at it