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

  • dinklesplein [any, he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.