The Truth about Crimea, the Ukraine and Russia

(1) Crimea is historically part of Russia. Crimea was annexed to Russia during the reign of the Empress Catherine the Great [1729-1796].  According to the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, signed on July 10, 1774, Crimea became a Russian protectorate.  Crimea was part of Russia before the United States declared its independence!  Ninety-seven percent of the Crimean population use Russian as their main language, according to a poll conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology. 

(2) There was no invasion of Crimea.  According to the Partition Treaty treaty signed in 1997, Russia was granted the right to station up to 25,000 troops and maintain the Russian Black Sea Fleet in its naval base  in Crimea until 2017; in 2010 this was extended to 2042. In return, Russia paid the Ukrainian government $526.5 million.  So, all the Russian military forces in the Crimea--16,000 of them--were there legally.

(3) The reunification of Crimea with Russia was entirely legitimate.  The referendum was  a peaceful, democratic and entirely transparent expression of the will of the Crimean inhabitants themselves. The official result from the referendum was a 96.77% vote ‘for’ integration of the region into the Russian Federation; turnout was 83.1%.

(4) The Crimean referendum was observed by 135 international observers from 23 countries with not one violation registered. The Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections [EODE] observer mission concluded that the referendum was conducted freely and fairly.

(5) The Ukraine wasn't even an independent nation in 1954 when Khrushchev handed over the Crimea without even consulting the Crimeans. At that time, the Ukraine was one of the 15 republics in the USSR--the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--the equivalent of a state in America, and the transfer was purely administrative.  The equivalent in the United States would be if an American president  arbitrarily handed over the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Wisconsin [whose Cheeseheads spoke a different language], and then, 60 years later, its residents voted to reunite with their fellow Michiganders.

 
(6) The referendum caught completely off-guard the Russophobes like the foul-mouthed Victoria Nuland.   

["Fuck the E(uropean) U(nion)," she stated in a leaked telephone conversation with American ambassador to the Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, as reported on February 7, 2014].

Nuland was an agent provocateur in Kiev, fomenting, aiding and abetting the illegal and unconstitutional coup d'état that ousted the legitimate and democratically-elected president of the Ukraine,Viktor Yanukovych.  To use Nuland's own gutter language, the referendum "fucked" her plans.  All the Russophobes--and President Obama, who should know better--could do was squeal like stuck pigs that the referendum was "illegal," and then browbeat and threaten the pint-sized countries in the U.N. General Assembly that they would suffer "consequences" if they didn't vote the the way the United States ordered.  But some nations bravely resisted the American bully: the final vote was 100 in favor, 11 against and an almost unprecedented 58 abstentions: even America's "51st state," Israël, abstained from the vote!


[For the record, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, a holdover from the George W. Bush administration, where she was the top foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, is married to the notorious neo-con Robert Kagan.  In 1997, he co-founded and served as a director for the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which has now transmogrified into a vipers' nest of neo-con warmongers innocuously labeled the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). Nuland has emerged as one of the key figures who have been accused by various sources of initiating a cover-up of the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, resulting in the death of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.]