I understand the argument from Putin and his supporters that the Crimea is historically part of Russia and was given to the Ukraine SSR by the filthy Communists, so Russia had the right to take it back.
But does Crimea have a particular value aside from that historical view? Strategic location? particular resources? Skilled workforce that Russia needs?
Just curious if it’s just the historical argument, or if there is something more?
Deep water port.
Ah - Sevastopol. Thank you. That makes sense.
I think historically, the Urkainian area was the breadbasket of the USSR, and I saw a headline of an opinion piece that Putin was after the nuclear reactors.
I also have head talk about how it’s part of a plan to regain the territory and resources of the USSR, which Putin seems to idolize Which would suggest most of the given reasons are just smoke and mirrors.
I am skeptical we will ever get a real answer for Putin’s agression, in Ukraine or elsewhere he’s invaded.
To be clear, Crimea is traditionally a Russian territory dating back to its annexation in 1783 from the Ottoman Empire. Prior to the USSR, Crimea was not a part of Ukraine and only has a minority of ethnic Ukrainians, and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union it became an Autonomous Republic hosting both Russian and Ukrainian bases. Of course, during the Soviet era the traditional population of Crimean Tatars were forcibly displaced, imprisoned, and otherwise persecuted (often while still fighting in the Soviet Army in WWII), and it isn’t as if Russia had some exclusive legal claim on Crimea, nor was Ukraine in violation of existing agreements, so the military occupation of Crimea in 2014 was unprovoked, but not to the same extent of the current invasion of Ukraine, which is a sovereign nation that has never been part of Russia or under nominal Russian control.
I don’t think it takes any deep dive into the mind of Vladimir Putin to understand his motivations with regard to Ukraine; he’s the authoritarian leader of an autocratic regime that has only the faintest vestiges of being democratic, has an ‘election’ in 2024 in which while the outcome is predetermined would still be easier for the public to accept if Putin were actually popular, and he is worried both about the cultural influence of an adjacent democracy as well as the potential for Ukraine to for strong economic and diplomatic ties with the European Union that he feared might leader to an enjoiner to NATO, promises and NATO’s own distaff treatment of Ukraine notwithstanding. Like all Russians, he has a long-standing feaf of being invaded and wants a set of buffer states, which is compounded by the paranoia of being an aging former spymaster who knows well that someone else could do to him what he has done to so many others.
The economic considerations of grabbing Ukraine’s (significant) nuclear power plants and its other economic yields is belied by the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a plan to actually put these to use, and the enormous economic cost of the invasion even before nations started imposing real sanctions. This invasion and subsequent occupation would have come at enormous fiscal cost to the flailing Russian economy even if it had gone to whatever plan he had, and it seems obvious that Putin and whomever is advising him had no conception of how much resistance the Ukrainians would have to occupation despite years of resistance.
This was, like many military adventures, ill-conceived, poorly planned, went literally off the rails almost immediately, and will cost far more than any gains in assets, territory, and goodwill. In fact, it seems likely to drive Russia into being essentially a client state to China as their only customer for oil and gas, for which I feel it likely that China will demand copious concessions of land and other mineral rights. The only way I see this not happening is a radial regime change in Russia, retreat from Ukraine with apologies and compensation, and an agreement to an international peacekeeping force in a demilitarized zone of Eastern Ukraine and Western Russia. Or Putin goes into an apocalyptic rage at how inept the Russian Army is and decides to escalate to nuclear weapons, which is a scenario that I don’t even want to contemplate.
Stranger