https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media

Apparently these guys did a poll, or Gallup did a poll that these guys considered legitimate, and they found that about 80% of Crimeans believed the Euromaidan coup government was illegitimate. About 80% of Crimeans thought the referendum to join the Russian Federation was legit and reflected the will of the people (Western Ukrainians, on the other hand, did not believe this), and about 70% of Crimeans viewed Russia's intervention as a good thing and thought that joining the RF would improve their quality of life.

Can anyone corroborate this? I'm just poking through Wikipedia sources. Because if this is true it kind of drives a stake through the heart of the notion that Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. It sounds a lot more like the people of Crimea overwhelmingly decided that being part of Russia was a better deal and enthusiastically switched their allegiance.

https://www.refworld.org/docid/469f38ec2.html

If this timeline is at all accurate Crimea and Ukraine have been doing rounds about whether Crimea and Sevastopol should be part of Russia or Ukraine, what languages should be considered official state languages, and all sorts of fights over who holds what political and legal powers in Crimea, and these disagreements have gone on continuously since the dissolution of the USSR without stopping.

As far back as 1998 a majority of Crimeans were pro joining the Russian Federation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars

Also, this shit. I'm open to the possibility that some of this is western exaggeration but on face value it looks like the deportation, cultural genocide, and mass murder of tens of thousands of people on Stalin's orders because Beria said they were traitors. And things have remained bad and complicated for them since as they were outnumbered by Russians when the Soviets finally let them go home in the late 80s and have had trouble with a large portion of Crimean Tartars struggling to get Ukrainian citizenship through the 90s and having political disputes with the Russian majority as well as some Ukrainian governments.

Also, apparently in the mid nineties a little over 50% of Ukrainians preferred Russian as their first language, and there's been constant disputes where Kiev tries to force everyone to speak Ukrainian and the Russian speaking half of the country pushes back.

Based on reading a lot of random articles this war would have been inevitable even without NATOs bullshit. Kiev has spent thirty years trying to impose Ukrainian nationalism on a population that is about 50% Russian speaking and the Russian Speakers have never wanted that. Kiev has constantly asserted over the years that Ukrainian was the only allowed official language in Ukraine, then been forced to walk back on that because obviously. The borders of Ukraine and Russia went from being a formality under the USSR to actual national borders with all the resulting economic, military, and political problems with the dissolution of the USSR, But Kiev's attempts to create a single unified Ukrainian nationality were always bogus and ridiculous since so much of the population had so many cultural and linguistic and historical and political ties across the border. The EuroMaidan coup just pressed on fault lines that had been present since the dissolution of the USSR, and the declaration of the DPR and the LPR was basically the Russian speaking minority asserting that they wouldn't be allow themselves to be forced in conform with Kiev's Ukrainian Nationalist agenda. And then this year Russia was finally forced to step in because the inter ethnic, interlinguistic, and intercultural dispute between Ukraine and it's Russian speaking minority was about to turn in to a fucking massacre.

NATO and western support of Ukrainian Nationalist factions and outright Nazis was a factor, but NATO was just pouring fuel on a fire that was already burning by empowering Kiev to constantly attempt to alienate and marginalize the huge Russian speaking minority.

The dissolution of the USSR was a fucking mistake and nationalism is for idiots. And the Crimean Tartars got totally fucked by Stalin and the Soviet governments that came after him.