COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Vladimir Putin’s
forces swept into the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in February 2014”
Your headline is simply ignorant propaganda.
What Russian annexation of Crimea?
There was a legitimate referendum in Crimea, and those
voting to leave Ukraine voted overwhelmingly to do so.
The same great majority petitioned Russia for
re-unification. Russia accepted.
Why is this regarded as being any different than East
Germany’s having rejoined West Germany? It isn’t any different, except in the
eyes of the American goons who engineered an anti-democratic coup in Ukraine
intended to hurt Russia, a country displaying absolutely no hostility towards
America or Europe.
Do your editors and journalists not know that Crimea has a
Russian history going back to Catherine the Great?
That they are overwhelmingly Russian speakers?
That Ukraine only received Crimea as an internal
administrative measure by Khrushchev in the days of the USSR?
Residents of Crimea have little history and little loyalty
to Ukraine as a state. Nothing in the least odd or illegal about that.
All the more so after a coup in Ukraine against an elected
government, and with the new coup-installed government almost immediately
taking many measures against Russian-speakers, including trying to make their
language illegal.
It was natural for large parts of Ukraine to revolt against
such stupidly oppressive measures.
The only answer from the clowns running what's left of
Ukraine was to hurl the army against Russian-speakers in former East Ukraine.
They were so incompetent in their efforts, despite overwhelmingly greater
numbers and resources, that East Ukraine is de facto independent today.
The current government could not even manage to recruit and
hold troops. They tried big drafts in Western Ukraine, but many or most of the
men literally went into hiding.
As for the forces fighting in the East, quite a number left
to go to Russia where they were welcomed as refugees.
Thus, the much larger Ukrainian forces sit at a standstill
in the East, having achieved nothing but random killing and destruction.
By the way, some of the forces this ineffectual government
has used in the East are not even proper government troops but weird right-wing
militia outfits like the Azov Battalion. Some of these outfits could sure fool
an observer into thinking they were Nazis, given their badges and flags and
behavior.
It's all a very bad, not-so-funny joke.
