This post is, as we had a couple of days ago, a place to have your say about this weekend’s events in Ukraine.
Here is a brief history of Crimea.
Crimea has been fought over since before it was Crimea. The ancient Greeks set up some colonies, but then came the Romans, then the Crimean Tatars (part of Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde), then Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Khazars, and then the Kievan Rus in the 10th and 11th centuries. Byzantine Empire, Mongols, then Venice, and then the Republic of Genoa.
Then it’s the 1400s and the Crimean Tatars are back and establish a khanate that ran massive slave-trading, often raiding Russia and Ukraine for slaves. Then in 1783, the Russian Empire annexed Crimea.
Now to 1853-1856, the Russia Empire lost a war in Crimea against Britain, France, Sardinia and what was left of the Ottoman Empire. The war was over religious rights or control of the Black Sea, take your pick.
During and after the Russian revolution, Crimea changed hands several times. There were terrible massacres as the White (anti-Bolshevik) army fought the Red Army. In 1920 the Red Army executed as many as 20,000 White Russians. Crimea became part of the Soviet Union. In the 1920s and 30s there were several famines.
WWII: lots of fighting Nazis. Lots of ethnic cleansing as Stalin sent Crimeans of many ethnicities to Central Asia. Kruschev gave Crimea to Ukraine (as an autonomous province) in 1954, and it was soon transformed into a holiday destination for Russians. Lots of those sanatoriums (spa + dry-out clinic) the Russians are so fond of.
But then the Soviet Union collapsed. Crimea went with Ukraine, which upset the Russians because the Russian Black Sea Fleet has a huge base in Crimea, in Sevastopol. And let’s not forget the maze of pipelines that criss-cross Ukraine, carrying Russian-produced oil. Crimea has two of these pipelines, one of which terminates in Sevastopol, for exporting oil via tanker ships.
Which brings us, more or less, to recent events in Kiev and the overthrow of Yanukovich. As I write this, Saturday 1 March 2014, things are hotting up rapidly as Putin, freed of his Sochi shackles, is doing some vigorous sabre-rattling.
Image from Wiki Commons. Research assistance from Wikipedia, NPR, BBC.
