Regarding Crimea .........there is a long history of Crimea trying to get it’s Independence from Ukraine:
While Crimea was officially ‘an autonomous region’ formally within Ukraine, it has its own Parliament and, up until 1995, its own President. The majority of Crimeans are Russian-speakers, ...... they have voted repeatedly for close relations with Russia throughout their history.
Crimea was unilaterally handed over to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 – in a move of dubious legality – Crimea was caught between Russia and Ukraine as the old USSR collapsed.
(In 1991), the Movement for a Republic of Crimea gathered 180,000 signatures on a petition calling for a popular ‘referendum on Crimean independence’, an informal “opinion poll” was held in which the modified ‘demand for close relations with Russia’ passed overwhelmingly, and the elected Parliament adopted a resolution declaring Crimean sovereignty.
Kiev responded to this with the threat of force, and at that point the bargaining began....... The Crimeans, for their part, used the separatist threat to gain some leverage in the negotiations with Kiev:.... what they wanted – and got – was ‘control over local resources’, which were about to be “privatized” by the crooks in Kiev. and looted by various Western Ukrainian oligarchs........... The local oligarchs took exception to this, and in the end they won out:.......... Kiev basically caved and the resulting compromise kept Crimea within Ukraine, albeit ‘with full economic and political autonomy’.
The compromise, however, didn’t last long:
(in 1993), as the Ukrainian economy collapsed, the Ukrainian currency approached worthlessness, and the social fabric of what was essentially an administrative unit of the old Soviet Union rather than an actual nation came apart at the seams,....... a national movement for Crimean independence gained traction....... The presidential and parliamentary elections of (1994) gave Yuri Meshkov, a Russian nationalist, a big majority and a subsequent referendum on closer ties with Russian won nearly 80 percent of the vote.
Kiev went ballistic, and Meshkov appealed to the Russians for protection, but President Yeltsin was more interested in appeasing the West and the Crimeans were ultimately ‘left to fend for themselves’.......... The Crimean presidency was abolished by unilateral decree of the ‘Ukrainian Rada’, and troops from Western Ukraine were sent in.
That same year, Yeltsin signed a tripartite agreement with Ukraine and the US, in which the Ukrainians agreed to give up their nuclear weapons – left over from the old Soviet days widely believed to guarantee Western ‘support’ for Ukraine in the event of a threat to its arbitrarily-defined borders.
Yet the Crimean desire to be free of the Ukrainian yoke did not abate:
in (2008), the Crimean Parliament voted to recognize Abhkazia and Ossetia, two former Soviet autonomous regions that had been arbitrarily handed over to Georgia and subsequently voted to rejoin Russia........... That same year, ‘one million’ Crimeans signed a petition demanding the Russian fleet be allowed to retain its presence in Sevastopol.
In spite of threats of force, and a series of heavy-handed administrative measures, Crimean separatism has continuously bubbled just beneath the surface, ....and polls show the majority of Russian-speakers and Ukrainian-speakers favored separation....... This desire to get away was no doubt amplified a thousand-fold as a coalition of corrupt oligarchs and outright fascists with US support overthrew Viktor Yanukovich, the elected President, and the country teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and chaos.
With officials of the ultra-rightist Svoboda party – formerly the “Social National” party – in top positions in the new government in Kiev, and with the outright neo-Nazis of “Right Sector” being handed control of police and law enforcement bodies, ......Crimeans refused to recognize Kiev’s authority. .........The Crimean Parliament once again declared independence and appealed to Russia for security guarantees, ....while the head of the Ukrainian navy, which is stationed in Sevastopol, defected to the Crimean side.
http://www.wallstreetsectorselector.com/investment-articles/analyst-desk/2014/03/russia-crimea/
And thanks a lot for the link, I'm saving that.
Regards
What was of dubious legality was the Soviet regime, which exterminated the "kulaks" and between 2 to 7 million Ukrainians, and also German and other peoples who had taken up residence there.
Regarding Crimea .........there is a long history of Crimea trying to get it’s Independence from Ukraine:
This is sad defense for a fraudulent and corrupt election. Russkie soldiers, armed with grenade launchers, marched in a fringe Russian-Annexation party leader (with 2 members in the Crimean rada), who was also a member of the Russian mafia (which is populated by "former" KGB), and was made Prime Minister on the spot, without any election.
The Referendum that he declared afterwards was launched through 1) Complete control of media with constant lies. 2) Little kids voting. 3) Ballots being trucked in apparently already filled out with a "yes" vote. 4) People being disappeared from off the street, tortured to death, and their bodies found in the woods later. 5) Russkies marking Tatar houses to remind them of Soviet purges.
And the result of something like 80 or 90 percent in favor was impossible, because even the very best polls that had been taken in the area showed that they were, at best, split between independence (and thus annexation) and not, with 30 percent of the population, at the very least, guaranteed to always oppose it.
As for the "dubious" legality of giving Crimea to Ukraine. Crimea is geographically connected to Ukraine. It is the Soviet regime, which killed between 2 to 7 million people in Ukraine, including ethnic Germans and others, and colonized the land, that is of dubious legality.