You do have to bring the local military under your control. In fact, that’s the first thing you do during an invasion. Plunder isn’t the right word.
You can also allow them to withdraw - especially if you’re not, technically, fighting a war with them.
Right, “plunder” isn’t the right word – the right word is “theft”. The theft included movable military assets, including Ukraine’s one and only submarine, not to mention the entire resources of Crimea, however you want to assess that. And the first three posters here got it right – the legal basis of it all was “who’s gonna stop me? You and what army?” Except their quotes were better. Putin’s shameless hypocrisy is astounding but not surprising. Any goodwill that might have come out of the Olympics is long gone, but one assumes the chinless little weasel thinks it’s worth it.
It’s good to see Obama and other major leaders doing a few things but they probably won’t amount to much in the larger scheme of things. There has been talk of throwing Russia out of the G8 but I doubt that will happen. The G7 have too much self-interest at stake.
View it from a Crimean taxpayer’s point of view. Citizen X has paid taxes all his/her life to pay for government services, including the military base in the next town. Crimea becomes independent. Isn’t there a reasonable expectation that military installations located in Crimea would devolve to the government of the new Crimean state, representing Citizen X and those other taxpayers who have already paid for them? Can’t it at least be a factor in negotiation?
(I’m not trying to justify what’s happening in Crimea, which is obviously a Russian invasion with a mock referendum on independence. The above is just a projection of my point of view on what should happen to federal infrastructures if Québec were to secede from Canada. The Rest-of-Canada definitely has a different viewpoint on this.)
Is Crimea also offering to take on a percentage of Ukraine’s national debt?
Military bases are not like schools, police stations, fire stations and hospitals, which are usually distributed throughout a country according to the population. Military bases are located for strategic advantage. The bases in Crimea weren’t placed there because the Crimean population paid taxes for those particular installations in order to protect Crimea. They were placed there to protect all of Ukraine, and I assume they were paid for by the entire country.
Thank you, Sage Rat!
If Kosovo is the one setting the beat, then you might as well accuse the majority of world leaders of changing the tune when it benefits them. Every state which has recognized Kosovo’s self-determination has refused to recognize Crimea’s self-determination. Of course, the reality is that the no two separatist movements have identical circumstances, and so supporting one but not another is not necessarily hypocritical.
[Darth Sidious] I shall make it legal. [/DS]
Well, to be fully honest, most of them were originally placed there to protect, to provide training, or serve as a force projection point into the Black Sea/Balkan region for, the USSR (and some even going all the way back to the Russian Empire).
True, but what relevance does that have? There are military bases in the American south which had originally been placed there to protect and serve the interests of the United States, and before that even back to the British Empire. This fact neither obliged nor inclined the Confederacy to return them to the US after they came under the former’s control.
Did you really think I was arguing that? man, I need to write more clearly. My sole point was correcting the “the taxpayers of [polity] paid for it for their purposes” sequence. Which as you accurately point out would not be what creates ir negates a claim on the bases and the property for either current side.
The legal principle is known as “fait accompli”. Similar to Napoleon’s assumption of title to most of Europe, ditto the third reich, ditto the european powers in Africa, and so on.
Stalin sued in Stalingrad to overcome the German claim, and eventually prevailed with his own “fait accompli” judgement.
In many of these cases, new laws by the established power simply re-inforce the claim and make it court-legal.
Now, now; they’re merely using the ancient legal precident of nulla poena sine lege certa. (I bet you didn’t know the Russians were so good with Latin, did you?)
Note that this was the same justification used for the pre-WWII the annexation of Carpathian Ruthenia, Poland, and the Baltic States, e.g. “It was just lying there…what did you want us to do, leave it for someone else to take?”
Stranger
I’m going to go with Edie Izzard on this one:
Russia had a lease on their own naval base in Sevastopol. I assume this base goes back to the USSR or before. What about the Ukrainian naval base in Sevastopol, and all the ships and other equipment there? Did all that exist under the USSR?
There was a large number of Soviet installations from different branches of service across the Crimea, including in and around Sevastopol. In the agreement that was eventually reached some facilities became Ukrainian run and some stayed under Russian lease. As mentioned earlier, under the present state of affairs it’s immaterial if all were such legacies or any were built and inaugurated since the late 90s, conquest is conquest.
It seems objectively worth it to me. Crimea is an extremely valuable asset. And it’s not like there was much good will to squander to begin with.
Happened! But I think you’re right: this will have some comebacks to the detriment of the G7 economies.
…except that Putin himself explicitly drew a comparison between Kosovo and Crimea, and claimed the circumstances of the annexation are identical. It doesn’t matter whether the comparison is objectively valid, only that Putin claims it is and is therefore a hypocrite.