i’m sorry if this makes some users here feel old lol but i was a preteen and apolitical obviously when this happened so i genuinely know nothing about this situation. does it have anything to do with nato? i’m just curious to get a marxist analysis of this situation
I feel like it can't be stressed enough that the people of Crimea did not want to be a part of Ukraine after Euromaidan. Idk how bullshit that referendum was but I think joining Russia would have still been the most likely outcome even under a free election.
Idk how bullshit that referendum was
western polling doesn't contradict it and they would absolutely do so if it was even remotely possible.
I mean it was done under Russian military occupation so :shrug-outta-hecks: kinda sketch
Everything is done under military occupation if you're not on the side of the ruling power
Yeah but it was under Russian military occupation because most of the people in Crimea either were Russian Navy, being part of the Black Sea Fleet operating out of Sevastopol, or worked for the Black Sea Fleet in some capacity. The Russian military didn't have to invade Crimea, they were already there as one of the main economic and social institutions of the region.
There are two sides to the answer. Russia largely wanted to protect its naval base in Crimea and its access to the black sea. Crimea has wanted to be independent from Ukraine ever since the Soviet Union fell. It actually used to be semi-independent from 1992 to 1995 until Ukraine overthrew its government.
These factors affected each other. Russia knew that the population would be accepting of Russian rule so taking Crimea would be relatively easy and would protect its naval base from the new western-backed government in Kiev. I honestly don't know whether Crimeans would have preferred independence or joining Russia. But given what we know now about how the Donbas republics fared, joining the Russian federation was the correct move regardless of what people might have wanted.
Russia has like 3 non-crimea ports that aren’t shuttered every winter
They can just wait for global warming and in 30 years Arkhangelsk will be ice free year round
:porky-happy:
The history of Russia can be summed up in 2 sentences
We really need some warm water ports
and
We really need to make sure those psychopaths to the west can’t march right up to St. Petersburg
warm water ports is a meme by liberal IR guys, it certainly matters but i would be careful overstressing its importance personally.
I don't think it's possible to overstress how vital it is for a nation to have year round access to the sea. St. Petersburg could be blockaded easily with naval mines and missiles, while Archangel is ice bound for a significant part of the year. Vladivostok is several hundred million miles from anywhere that matters and directly across the pacific from US naval bases in Hawaii and San Francisco.
Like if you've got evidence to the contrary please by all means present it, but to the best of my knowledge year round access to the seas with high volume ports is right below energy independence and nuclear weapons on the list of vital strategic assets.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44642451?seq=2
Naval War College Review, 1993.
The first is that Russia has always had a warm water with free access to the open ocean - Murmansk. Despite its northern latitude this port is kept ice-free year-round by the Gulf Stream
This might seem counter to what I'm saying given the paper predicts an urge from the Russian Federation to gain warm water ports:
The thrust of this essay is not that Russia has no interest in maritime access, but that the areas where geography allows Russia secure access to the sea with usable inland communications are exceptionally limited. Imperial Russia possessed all these areas - the Soviet Union had all of them except Finland. It is not unlikely that the Russian Federation will feel the urge, at some point, to reoccupy them.
Crimea would certainly count as one of those but let's be real it's not the most valuable of warm water ports given the Bosphorus and a friendly Turkey isn't a guarantee if I'm a Russian policy planner. Also keep in mind that I'm contesting the idea that warm water ports have been central to the history of Russian Foreign Policy which includes both Tsarist and Soviet Russia, neither of which in reality prioritised it as much as it's been made out to be.
Crimea is host to Russian naval bases and a big Russian population, and the bases were leased from Ukraine after their transfer to the Ukrainian SSR and the dissolution of the USSR. When the NATO government was established in Kiev, Russian forces were already in Crimea and clearly weren't going to hand over Sevastopol to NATO.
Something that should be noted is that the the majority of Crimea's Army and Navy immediately defected to Russia. As an odd note, this also included 100% of the dolphins.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/jul/06/ukraine-combat-dolphins-russia-give-back
According to the Wikipedia article about combat dolphins,Ukraine claims that the dolphins killed themselves patriotically.
2004 orange revolution -> 2014 coup
both times ousting the same 'both sides' guy in favor of a pro-western candidate
shit got progressively worse for ethnic russians in ukraine during this period, and got exponentially worse after. lots of places tried to secede from ukraine afterwards, only crimea succeeded because it was the only place russia decided to directly intervene in. places like donetsk and lugansk where the referendums passed were not recognized by russia, referendums failed in places like odessa and kharkov for various reasons, one of the most prominent being because the nazis killed everyone.
Yeah, I was surprised to find out that Crimea has tried to declare autonomy within Ukraine or secede from Ukraine more or less every three years between the destruction of the CCCP and the 2014 coup. The coup just finally created enough of a strategic crisis for Russia that Crimea was finally able to break free from Ukraine.
Others have all come in with good reasons. But to summarise
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Russian sympathetic region that is arguably historically more culturally Russian than Ukrainian
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access to the rail route over Crimea is essential for supply to eastern Europe and Transnistria even in peace
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Grain producing region, though not as much as Donbass which is the primary producer for Eastern Europe.
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most importantly, Sevastopol. He who contols Sevastopol controls the Black Sea, and even the west has a vested interest in preventing Turkish dominance of the area.
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I'm not knowledgeable on this subject so I hope someone else can weigh in.
A major reason Russia annexed Crimea is that doing so secured Russian access to their naval base at Sevastopol.
Extremely straightforward - Sevastopol. Russia's naval base on the black sea. If they lose Crimea to a hostile government in Kiev they lose Sevastopol and their access to the black sea that is hugely strategically important.
On a less strategic level, everyone in Crimea already either were Russian personnel in the Black Sea Fleet or worked for the Black Sea Fleet. Crimea was able to change flags from Ukraine to the RF without any friction because it was defacto already a Russian territory, only aligned with Ukraine on paper.
Russia's formal annexation of Crimea was an inevitable and predictable result of the 2014 coup. Russia simply cannot lose Sevastopol. No nation that wasn't completely subjugated would allow such a critical strategic asset to be stolen without a fight. And of course everyone in a position of power knew this. I won't go so far as to say it was an intentional provocation intended to start a hot war, but I also would not be the least bit surprised if that was a consideration in the coup. And of course all the whining about violations of international law and custom is absurd bad faith nonsense. Everyone in power knows why Russia took control of Crimea, they're just counting on gormless rubes who have no understanding of power to look at the matter in the most superficial and guileless way imaginable, or just huff "Russia bad because asiatic brainpan" as deeply as possible.
