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Good point on the distinction - while Russia loses on that, Putin loses much more. Essentially, he just cannot afford to lose.
Even still, Russia itself won't be better off if it just leaves and pays back everything - it's not only reparations, but also all the infrastructural investment etc, as well as trust of the people of Crimea (who really were supportive of the annexation, can tell you that from the ground) and many on the Donbass, as well as the crucial military base of Sevastopol, which was probably big part of the reason for the annexation to begin with - it's so important, in fact, that Sevastopol is the only city besides Moscow and Saint Petersburg with a special federal status.
Crimea is also dominated by ethnic Russians (65%), not Ukrainians (15%), which further exacerbates the issue.
The problem is so bad even Navalny said it's not easy to "just" return Crimea. Because it really isn't, it'd be a shitshow now, with locals standing up against it, and Russia having to sacrifice much more than just a meaningless peninsula.
If anyone should get a say about what happens with Crimea then it's the Tatars. Also you can't trust any of the post-occupation numbers, plenty of reason to not tell FSB agents that you think you're Ukrainian. People very much are in support of not being put through filtration camps, yes.
Ah. And you're willing to give up the Kurill islands lmao. Have you ever considered that that's not in any way comparable. Also, that Japan has kinda given up on the raping themselves through the population bit.
They're half a google away.
Russia's position in the Baltic is a) fucked anyway and b) Russia has enough resources to relocate to Novorossiysk. I mean that's where the fleet is right now anyway isn't it it seems to be big enough for the three and a half ships that haven't yet been promoted to submarines. The position in the Baltic is also fucked, to the point that Kaliningrad turned from asset to liability: It's not surrounding the Baltic states any more, instead Finland and Sweden in NATO mean that it's completely encircled. You still have Syria... though with the Siloviki deliberately ignoring ISIS-K that might not last forever, either. As said: They're cunning, not smart. All tactics no strategy no big picture thoughts.
Meanwhile, China is eyeing the eastern warm-water ports. Tsar Putin will be known to history under the cognomen "the foolish". If you're out to preserve the Russian empire, cutting your losses now is the right call, before it's too late and the whole thing collapses just like the district heating which could be fixed for something like three day's worth of war costs. Have you any notion of what kind of long-term damage that kind of thing causes. You talk about Sevastopol, where are you going to get people to build a fleet from when mothers freeze with their babies in their apartments.
You know what I think what's happening here? You're legitimately hoping for an end to the war and even Putin, but somehow expect Ukraine to do it for you. You'd like them to do it quickly, so you expect them to surrender. "Oh but it's because reasons, and complications", you say, smugly, unaware that all it's about is you rationalising outsourcing your rebellion to the Ukrainians because you are still depoliticised. The Kremlin guards have fewer weapons than Ukraine and watch this.
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Why should that be Tatars of all people? Crimean tatars comprise about 10% of the population, and are already disproportionally vocal, which irritates a lot of people on the peninsula. If anything, majority of Crimean population sees them as problem rather than leading source of power, and while I can't fully agree with that notion, it doesn't change the fact that power to Crimean Tatars is a bad idea. They should be protected - to a degree - but letting them singlehandedly decide the future of the place is critically questionable.
You can check pre-occupation numbers on Crimean population collected by Ukraine, you'll see the same picture. It's not that FSB is warping data or people are scared - it's that Crimea was only controlled by Ukraine for 60 years (1954-2014), and most of that history is was part of USSR anyway, so there wasn't enough time to replace populations. Also, again, literally nothing bad happens to people of Ukrainian nationality inside Russia. Like, I have a branch of Ukrainian family here, it's not dissidence to be of some origin. Ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea remained ethnic Ukrainians in Russian statistics.
Kurill islands were not to scale. You can change it to Kamchatka and Primorsky Krai, for example. Should make a fair share.
I found one poll by Gallup - https://news.gallup.com/poll/512258/ukrainians-stand-behind-war-effort-despite-fatigue.aspx - which proves your point on majority of Ukrainians supporting the war, althouth it also notes the support is dropping, from 70% in 2022 to 60% in 2023 - and no numbers for 2024. I'd like to see what the sentiment is now - whether it gets to 50%, stays strong or falls down. It also demonstrates what I said earlier about highest support coming from regions largely directly unaffected by war. Besides, I also wonder how much the omnipresent SBU influenced the answers - we have to be fair and consider censorship and watching eyes on both sides of the conflict.
Sevastopol is an important point of access to the Black sea, allowing quicker deployment and easier portection of eastern part of the sea. Kaliningrad is still very relevant, as it is not encircled per se, but rather a reachable point inside the lines of potential enemy. I wouldn't write it off for the potential of suprise actions in case of rapid delopments. I'm not a military expert, though, and can be wrong on some of that.
District heating failures are and were common, it's just that they came more into focus. The issues with the system appeared long before the war, and fixing it costs way more than "three days of war costs". And while I agree that those measures should have been taken long before and better instead the war, but we are where we are, and Crimean question is important and at the same time clusterfucked no matter how you look at it. You just try to make a case on why Russia should ignore it, consequences be damned.
I did watch the video. Both you and the author seem to be missing the point while trying to make it a lesson for the West (which currently degrades democracy under way more freedoms than Russians), thinking Russians are still politically indifferent, that they closed themselves off from the horrors of the war. Quite the opposite - the war turned to protest even those demographics who always stayed silent, and the horror of coming to war with a brotherly nation, one in which many of us have relatives in, rippled throughout society. My own relatives had a rocket coming into neighboring house. But the divide and conquer tactics succeeded already, and the only way you can proceed with from here is to silence or to jail, not to any meaningful civil victory. There's simply not enough coordination to pull off a protest that would actually shake society. People are angry, afraid, and everything else, they generally despise Putin - but there's so much control mechanisms that it's nearly impossible to actually come together and make a change. And individually, your protest normally lasts a few seconds, and then you get to enjoy your prison time.
Also, the concept of common responsibility has been given in a way that smells of a blame game. No, not all Germans were responsible (in a sense of worthy of taking blame for the regime) for what happened in the Reich, it's those who paraded it that actually got responsible, and others failed to stop them - bad that they didn't, but shifting blame on them wouldn't be fair. We can learn from their mistakes, and should learn from ours, on how to not get here in the first place, and take advantage if the system cracks.
The Russians certainly shouldn't get a say, they're settlers in occupied territory, one way or the other, starting with Katherine the Great. You can't just deport people, settle your own, and say "Well, guess they're the majority now they get to say what happens to the land".
As said: Russification started way before that. After Ukraine's independence the Tatar population in fact rebounded with people Stalin had deported moving back. Crimea voted to leave the USSR just as much as the rest of Ukraine, if anything the discussion was about being independent, not about staying with Russia. Independence (from Ukraine) then became less and less of an issue as Ukraine treated Crimea well, and independence would be difficult for such a small and import-dependent nation anyway.
Bullshit. The last time the silent demographics turned loud you had yourselves a February revolution. You're not even at 1905 levels, yet.
There's a crucial distinction to be made here: No, the war crimes etc. are not my responsibility. I wasn't even alive back then. But it is my responsibility to shape culture and politics in a way such that fascistic tendencies within the culture never surface (if you're up for it, read Emmanuel Todd, Germany is dominated by stem families). Otherwise yes a resurgence would be my fault.
1999 might still have been excusable, but Putin castling with Medvedev? Everyone's alarm bells should've gone off: "We're headed towards totalitarianism, again". Bow before the great father of the nation and let him rail your wife.
If we follow the "original settlers" logic, we need to return Crimea to Tauris, or, in lieu of those in the modern world, Greeks, who settled there about 2 millenia earlier than Tatars and were later conquered by Romans, Khazars and Russians, and only then Tatars, who very much didn't give a damn about anyone who lived there before them. "Original settlers" is always a bad justification, because various plots of land were inhabited by different people over the years. And currently, majority of Crimean population is Russian.
Right - many Tatars have returned, boosting Crimean Tatar population from ~1% to ~10%. That's what should be their share in political power. Or should Crimean Greeks seize all the power? Crimea never was an independent republic, it was only reformed in early 1991 to an autonomous region - which was, however, still part of Ukrainian SSR and then remained an autonomous region of Ukraine. As such, talks on joining Russia would essentially be an act of separatism, sparking conflict to try and get into Russia that probably wouldn't accept them to not provoke international backlash among huge crisis.
As per how Ukraine treated Crimea - the most pronounced side, one you probably think most about, is further support for Crimean Tatars; however, the Russian population (which, I remind you, is 6,5 times that of Crimean Tatars and a dominant nationality on the peninsula), as well as many Ukrainians themselves, were very much not happy about this development, sparking conflicts, so the benefit of such policy remains questionable. Actually, one of the hopes behind the transition was that Putin would better manage the Tatar question.
Economically, Crimea has won a lot over the transition to Russia, with massive infrastructure development, increase of wages, free trade with other regions of richer Russia, and increased flow of tourists fueling the economy. Also, Crimeans got easier access to Russian universities, which generally rank higher than Ukrainian ones.
I didn't say that protests were massive - although for the level of control that government currently exerts and lack of oppositional leadership, the scale was indeed impressive. I'm saying that many people came to protest for the first time, because when this happens, no level of political ignorance can overwhelm THIS. When 1917 happened, people were starving to death. You would either die from a bullet, or from starvation. People chose bullets.
There is a lot that should have been done differently before the current moment, and it is people's responsibility to not let that happen. But there we are, what now?
That is, utter naivete. It's like Russians living in Estonia dreaming of Russian greatness, stepping across the border for the first time in 45 years, only to literally step in shit once they're across and come back as quickly as they can.
Kremlin guards have fewer weapons than the Ukrainian army. Would you rather catch a bullet in Donbas or in Moscow? No landmines in front of the Kremlin, either. You're Russian, you're gonna say "валяй, ебёна мать!" one way or the other, question is where's the cart bloody going?
If the Russian people don't have that in them, then it's going to be a grinding defeat in Ukraine followed by a regime-internal putsch and whatever the Siloviki come up with next, everyone up there already has made their move and it's probably going to be another Gorbachev: Someone who the powers that be think is a safe and controllable option because he (definitely a he) manoeuvred to be seen as safe and controllable. On the upside, Swan Lake is a quite beautiful piece, actually. Though I have to admit I missed the 2nd act at the Bolshoi to sneak out with a girl, no regrets.