The Crimean issue was one of a kind in contemporary geopolitics. Not only another colour revolution planned, funded and coordinated by Washington but the last real attempt to mined the existence of Russia as the country it has been from 2001.
What I'm going to expose in here is the public story not told by the Western MSM and the globalist outlets controlled by the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the reckless CIA. I count them separately as each of them can have it's own different agenda separated from the rest.
First thing to do is to know what the Ukraine is and has been. The Ukraine is not and hasn't been a nation the way of its peers in the rest of Europe. Throughout history, the Ukraine was ruled by a number of powers - Lithuania, Poland, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Russia, until it eventually merged into the Russian-dominated Soviet Union after WW2. A Cossack republic emerged and prospered during the 17th and 18th centuries, but its territory was eventually split between Poland and the Russian Empire, and finally merged fully into the Russian-dominated Soviet Union in the late 1940s as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1991, Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in the aftermath of its dissolution at the end of the Cold War.
Ukranians, Russians and Belarussians are common peoples that share a same cultural ancestry: Kievan Rus' (AD 882). They also share ethnicity (East Slavic tribes), language (Old East Slavic), alphabet (Cyrillic) and religion (Orthodox Christians).
In 1917 a chaotic period of warfare ensued after the Russian Revolution. The internationally recognised Ukrainian People's Republic emerged from its own civil war of 1917–1921. The Ukrainian–Soviet War (1917–1921) followed, in which the bolshevik Red Army established control in late 1919. The Ukrainian Bolsheviks, who had defeated the national government in Kiev, established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which on 30 December 1922 became one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union. Initial Soviet policy on Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture made Ukrainian the official language of administration and schools. Soviet policy in the 1930s turned to the russification of the country though.
From 1921 to 1954 Ukraine was part of the Russian Republic but then was transferred to the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic by Nikita Kruschev as an administrative action of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union which transferred the government of the Crimean Peninsula from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian SSR. The transfer of the Crimean Oblast (region) to Ukraine has been described as a "symbolic gesture", marking the 300th anniversary of Ukraine becoming a part of the Tsardom of Russia. The administrative action that ceded Ukraine authonomy from Russia and the Soviet Union was not - and this is key to understand the simbiotic relationship between the two peoples - a cession for independence or the like out of Russia, but only that of authonomy the way Catalonia is from Spain. Authonomy is giving a local government the right to rule over administrative spheres but in no way the right to give away sovereignty. Nina Kushcheva, Krushchev great-granddaughter, said his great-grandfather motivation "was somewhat symbolic trying to reshuffle the Soviet centralized system", but also because he was very fond of Ukraine, a country he felt great affinity with.
For Sergei Kruschchev, Krushchev's son, the decision was due to "the building of a hydro-electric dam on the Dnieper River and the consequent desire for all the administration to be under one body." Sevastopol in Crimea being the site of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, a quintessential element of Russian and then of Soviet foreign policy, the transfer had the intended effect of binding Ukraine inexorably to Russia, "Eternally Together"," as a poster commemorating the event of 1954 proclaimed.
The transfer increased the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine by almost a million people. Prominent Russian politicians considered the transfer to be controversial to say the least.
In January 1992, the Supreme Soviet of Russia questioned the constitutionality of the transfer, accusing Nikita Khrushchev of treason against the Russian people and said that the transfer was illegitimate. However, in a 1997 treaty between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, Russia recognized Ukraine's borders, and accepted Ukraine's sovereignty over Crimea. By this time, nonetheless, the russification of the Crimean peninsula was almost complete after Stalin expulsed an important part of the Tatars (Turkic ethnic group) to Central Asia in 1944 and Ukrainians moving to Ukraine's mainland.
To complicate things further, Sevastopol, the biggest city in Crimea and headquarters of the Russian Naval Fleet of the Black Sea, the Sea of Amov and the Mediterranean Sea since the 17th century (1696), as of 2014 allocating naval and amphibious warfare, 25k's servicemen, 53 warships and 6 submarines, was left in a legal limbo. There was confusion about the status of Sevastopol and whether it was a part of the transfer as it had a degree of independence from the Crimean Oblast and never formally ratified, although it was later mentioned as Ukrainian territory in the Soviet Constitution and the Belavezha Accords (agreement that declared the Soviet Union as effectively ceasing to exist and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as its successor.
It was after all these vicissitudes that Ukraine became in 1991 a real subject of international relations.
The post-Soviet aftermath:
Following its independence, the Ukraine declared itself a neutral state and it formed a limited military partnership with Russia while also establishing a partnership with NATO in 1994.
Viktor Yanukovich was elected the fourth president of Ukraine on 7 February 2010 for the period 2010-2015. Yanukovych gained the second round with the 49 percent of the vote against the 45 of her rival Yulia Tymoshenko. He served as President until his removal from power in February 2014 as a result of the 2014 Ukrainian color revolution. During his mandate he sought a closer relationship with the EU in return for loans and intended to enter the Union but postponed it. The measure was interpreted as a back out by his opponents and led to a wave of protests which came to be known as Euromaiden. The initial student's manifestations were rapidly replaced by
Washington's meddling in Ukraine's internal affairs supporting far right Ukranian neo-nazi paramilitary forces. The stakes there couldn't be higher: In a rapid succession of facts it seemed possible for Washington to take Ukraine out of the Russian sphere. Not only that, there was a real possibility of taking Crimea and Sevastopol's Russian Naval Black Sea Fleet out from Russia. Wet dreams for the West.
The status of the Sevastopol's Russian Naval Base after the dissolution of the Soviet Union
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the claim of the Russian Navy for use of the naval base was logically lost. The soil was then under Ukranian sovereignty. As regulated by the Partition Treaty on the Black Sea Fleet signed in 1994, Russia maintained the right to use the Port of Sevastopol for 20 years until 2017. In 2010, the sign of the Kharkov Pact between Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovich and Russia's Dimitry Medvenev, extended the lease until 2042 in exchange of cheap Russian natural gas for the decades to come. The pact aroused much controversy in Ukraine. The controversy by the pro-Western forces in Ukraine proved crucial for the events to come.
What the lost of Crimea and Sevastopol would have meant for the Russian soul
As established above, Sevastopol has been the flagship port of the Imperial Russian Navy since the 17th century (1696). Russia is a massive landmass, it covers 11 time zones and 17 million km2 (6.6 million square mi). It's a well unified-ethnic country, counting 81 percent of ethnic Russians and 19 percent of many others, being the Tatars the major minority counting for 3.7 percent. In all, 160 different other ethnic groups and indigenous peoples live within its borders. 77 percent of ethnic Russians (113 million out of 147) live and work in European Russia.
Nonetheless, despite that huge massland, Russia is almost land-locked as it lacks of a wide access to the open seas and the exterior world. They've got a quite narrow access to the Baltic Sea via Saint Petesbourg but need to traverse close to Finnish, Estonian, Latvian Lithuanian, Swedish and Danish territorial waters before navigating the open seas of the Atlantic Ocean. On the south flank, Russian vessels need to navigate the Black Sea and cross NATO's Turkey straits of Bosphorus and Dardanelles before reaching the Mediterranean Sea and its pleiad of connections towards southern Europe, North Africa and the Red Sea towards the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean. They do have a good part of the Caspian Sea which connects well with the former muslim Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Iran, from where Russian frigates launched their initial attacks on ISIS head-choppers forces in Syria in 2015. But that's another story I'll talk about later on. Russian Far East port Vladivostok is the less busy traffic lane for Russia's access to the open seas and it will be of higher importance in the years to come. And last but not least is the Arctic route, a lane of future connections between the Asian (China, Japan, South Korea) manufacture hubs towards the northern European markets of Scandinavia and Germany, Netherlands and Denmark. But the same, these are futuristic routes.
Other than that, Russia is basically a land-locked country. In there lies what for the Russians were to be kicked-out from Crimea and Sevastopol for NATO. Not only a historic offense but a geostrategic declaration of war. It was not going to happen.
The Ukranian coup carried on by neo-Nazi Western forces
Tensions rose until the situation was untenable and Yanukovych not only fled to Russia but was actually rescued by the Russian military when a price was held upon his head the way it used to be in the American old west. The order to get him killed was already given when Russian forces rescued him out of Ukraine when he went back after he was ousted from office.
Protests against the color pro-Western coup occurred in Rusian populated southern Ukraine (Zacarpattia, Odessa, Crimea) and eastern regions (Donbass and Lugansk), where Yanukovich received the strongest support in the 2010 presidential election. Everything happened vertiginously in a few days. The Obama administration blundered and wanted to take it all instead of waiting the next presidential election in less than a year and then take it. But no, Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affaires (whatever that means in the American lexico mixing Europe with Asia), was caught on YouTube saying "Nuck* Europe, Poroshenko is our guy!"
A parenthesis in here is necessary. Having a high level American officer saying "Nuck Europe*, Poroshenko is our guy". How do you call that? Meddling in internal affairs of another state? Does that sounds similar to a recent scandal in the near past?
Anyway, that phrase was caught in YouTube said by who? Victoria Nuland herself. She said she wanted Poroshenko to be the next Ukranian president. And guessed what? It happened! Meddling in someone else's internal affairs? Nah!
Anyway, there was someone putting attention in Moscow, and he said 'Nah', it won't happen!
A few days after, this same person organised a referendum in Crimea whether the Crimeans wanted to become Europeanised or Russianised. Of course, the Russian Crimeans voted 96.77 percent to be Russianised with an 83.1 percent voter turnout. End of the story!
77 percent of Crimeans and 94% of Sevastopolians are native speakers of Russian. That was the result of the referendum. Was it quick? Yes. Was it legal? Yes (83.1 percent of the Crimeans endorsed it). Was it patronized by the Kremlin when they found Crimea in the hands of NATO? Yes. Was it illegal? No.
Donald Trump said it when he said during his presidential campaign: "I'd give up Crimea to the Russians".