Do Most Americans Care If Crimeans & Eastern Ukrainians Vote To Join With Russia?

3/10/2014 | Laissez-Faire Capitalist

[Laissez-faire capitalist]

Like Seek and Find said, Catalonia is set to vote on whether or not to split off from Spain. Scotland has an Independence Referendum coming up in September, Crimea is set to vote nationally on this in 6 days, and Eastern Ukraine will most likely follow with a national vote to join with Russia.

Give it time, and Quebec will try again to become an independent nation...

The world fracturing into more and more countries seems to be accelerating...

[Laissez-faire capitalist]

What say you?

[A_Tradition_Continues]

I say it is a conspiracy financed by the world’s map makers.

[cripplecreek]

Its easier to control many small countries than it is one large one. Crimea is kind of an outlier in that sense.

[Travis McGee]

Crimea is not just part of any Eastern European country. Crimea was part of Russia from the 1780s under Catherine the Great. Before that, it belonged to the Ottoman Empire, now defunct. Before that, it belonged to the city-state of Venice, now defunct.

In 1954, when the Ukraine was the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev literally gifted the Crimea to Ukraine as part of an internal USSR political deal to secure the support of the Ukrainian party bosses for his succession following the death of Stalin.

This was a purely internal USSR political gift with no international consequences in the 1950s. The Soviet military bases remained Soviet military bases. Khrushchev's unilateral political gift was of no concern to the world until the breakup of the USSR.

The way that Russians see the situation is that Putin is undoing Khrushchev's blunder. What Khrushchev gave away, Putin is taking back, and returning to the Russian fold.

It's important to understand this history. Crimea is the location of Russia's all-weather naval bases, and has been for over 200 years. The fluke of "Ukrainian Crimea" only lasted from 1954 until 2014, sixty years, a blink in historical terms. Before Khrushchev's unilateral political gift, Crimea was never part of Ukraine for one single day in recorded history.

Imagine a dictatorial President Eisenhower, on his own, "giving" NYC and Long Island to Connecticut in return for CT electoral college votes to assure his election. That is how Crimea was transferred to Ukraine in 1954.

Now, Putin is a KGB Soviet Gestapo thug, leader of assassins, and probably the greatest thief in history. But it's important to get the history right in order to avoid mistaking the situation for something it is not, and blundering into a major war. Crimea is not analogous to Latvia, Poland, or even the rest of Ukraine.

[DManA]

I’m waiting for someone to explain to me our interest there, beyond not letting Putin get his way.

[coloradan]

1. So long as the elections are free and fair.
2. When will Flyover Country secede from Forward!stan?

[dfwgator]

Borders have shifted all the time in that neck of the woods.

[dfwgator]

beyond not letting Putin get his way.

That's pretty much it. I suspect if Putin loved fags, the State Department wouldn't even care.

[A'elian' nation]

Moat Americans don’t care if America joins Russia.

[dfwgator]

It’s Hitler marching into the Rhineland.

Could anyone really argue back in 1936, that the Rhineland didn’t belong to Germany?

[grania]

I’m looking at that map. That small coastline Ukraine will have on the Black Sea....is it also majority ethnic Russian?

[McGruff]

Let the Euro-Wienies take the lead on this one.

[Last Dakotan]

I question the freedom of any election in which an army of occupation is present.

[cripplecreek]

Imagine a dictatorial President Eisenhower, on his own, "giving" NYC and Long Island to Connecticut in return for CT electoral college votes to assure his election. That is how Crimea was transferred to Ukraine in 1954.

That's basically how Michigan got "stuck" with the upper peninsula. Andrew Jackson gave the much more valuable Toledo strip to Ohio in return for delivering the Ohio vote to the democrats. Ohio did go democrat that year but in the end the UP has proven its value many times over.

[Dilbert San Diego]

No I don’t think Americans know the history of that area, nor do they care about certain regions becoming part of Russia. Americans do not care if Putin is trying to put the Russian empire back together.

[entropy12]

I don’t care a flying rat’s behind. We are a bankrupt nation by any standards of accounting. It is like a person who can not pay his credit card debt trying to get involved with a neighbor’s fight with her husband over who gets to park in the garage. Just stay out of it. Roman empire vanished after pursuing foreign wars with a bankrupt treasury, Soviet Union went kaput after trying to compete with USA star wars program, Hitler’s Germany fell after sending armies to Russia, Alexander the Great’s demise began after his loss in battles in Asia. Learn from history or be doomed to repeat it.

[Travis McGee]

Ukraine will still have the major seaport of Odessa. I'm not sure about its ethnic makeup.

If Putin stops after retaking Crimea, the world will forget it soon, and he will go down in Russian history as a great leader who deftly reversed Khrushchev's gift of Russian Crimea to Ukraine.

If he continues to take more and more of Ukraine or any other nations, he'll be the next Hitler.

It's too early to say which will happen.

[Travis McGee]

It might be, or in might not be. If Hitler stopped after retaking “certified German territory” then there would have been no WW2, and Nazi Germany might still be a global superpower.

It’s too early to know.

[nomad]

Amen, just that with things as they are, nothing is going to prevent some kind of depression or economic calamity but when you are in a hole, its good advice to stop digging.