sycasey said:
Cal88 said:
sycasey said:
Cal88 said:
sycasey said:
movielover said:
Sobering interview w Sergey Karaganov, prominent Russian political scientist and foreign policy strategist.
He sees the Ukrainian/ EU war dragging on unnecessarily, elites targeting Russia, so claims his views have gained traction. He acknowledges their losses, and 3x, 4x more for Ukraine. He considers the current EU leaders "mad dogs" who have "lost their minds" and "sense of history".
Maybe a lot of this was foreseeable and Putin starting the war was a huge mistake.
War with Zelensky's Ukraine was unavoidable, had Russia not intervened in 22 to repel the Kyiv army in the Donbas, the rebels there would have been overrun, and Kyiv would have turned to Crimea, which would have been much harder to defend for the Russian without the land bridge.
Oh no, Putin might not have been able to keep the other land he invaded.
You don't think that the Crimeans, who are overwhelmingly ethnic Russians, don't want to be part of Russia, but want to join the country that :
Irrelevant. You don't just go in and take the land even if that's what you think they want. There should be a legitimate process and vote for that.
This amounts to procedural pedantry, most likely motivated by your ideological bias, simply refusing the reality of the facts I have carefully laid out above.
There was a referendum and several independent polls that all confirm that over 3/4 of Crimeans, conservatively speaking, wanted to join Russia - see below.
If anything, it was incredibly fortuitous for Crimeans that their transition occurred with virtually no bloodshed and ended up reflecting their wishes and aspirations.
Post-referendum polls
The results of a survey by the U.S. government
Broadcasting Board of Governors agency, conducted April 2129, 2014, showed that 83% of Crimeans felt that the results of the March 16 referendum on Crimea's status likely reflected the views of most people there, whereas this view is shared only by 30% in the rest of Ukraine.[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#cite_note-138][132]
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Gallup conducted an immediate post-referendum survey of Ukraine and Crimea and published their results in April 2014. Gallup reported that, among the population of Crimea, 93.6% of ethnic Russians and 68.4% of ethnic Ukrainians believed the referendum result accurately represents the will of the Crimean people. Only 1.7% of ethnic Russians and 14.5% of ethnic Ukrainians living in Crimea thought that the referendum results did not accurately reflect the views of the Crimean people.[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#cite_note-139][133][/url] According to Gallup's survey performed on April 2127, 82.8% of Crimean people consider the referendum results reflecting most Crimeans' views,[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#cite_note-Gallup-140][134][/url] and 73.9% of Crimeans say Crimea's becoming part of Russia will make life better for themselves and their families, while 5.5% disagree.[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#cite_note-Gallup-140][134]
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In May 2014, Washington, D.C., pollster Pew Research published results of a survey that encompassed Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia, in which it was reported that 88% of Crimeans believed the government of Kyiv should officially recognize the result of Crimea's referendum.[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#cite_note-141][135][/url] According to survey carried out by
Pew Research Center in April 2014, the majority of Crimean residents say they believed the referendum was free and fair (91%) and that the government in Kyiv ought to recognize the results of the vote (88%).[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#cite_note-142][136]
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Between December 12 and 25, 2014,
Levada-Center carried out a survey of Crimea that was commissioned by John O'Loughlin, College Professor of Distinction and Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Gerard Toal (Gearid Tuathail), Professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech's National Capital Region campus. The results of that survey were published by Open Democracy in March, 2015, and reported that, overall, 84% of Crimeans felt the choice to secede from Ukraine and accede to Russia was "Absolutely the right decision", with the next-largest segment of respondents saying the decision to return to Russia was the "Generally right decision".
The survey commissioners, John O'Loughlin and Gerard Toal, wrote in their Open Democracy article that, while they felt that the referendum was "an illegal act under international law", their survey shows "It is also an act that enjoys the widespread support of the peninsula's inhabitants, with the important exception of its Crimean Tatar population" with "widespread support for Crimea's decision to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation one year ago". Their survey also reported that a majority of Crimean Tatars viewed Crimea's return to Russia as either the "Absolutely right decision" or the "Generally right decision".[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#cite_note-143][137]
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From January 16 22, 2015, Germany's GfK Group, with support from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives, followed-up their pre-referendum survey of Crimeans' voting intention with a post-referendum survey about how satisfied Crimeans are with the outcome of their referendum. GfK's post-referendum survey found that 82% of Crimeans "Fully endorse" Crimea's referendum and return to Russia, while another 11% "Mostly endorse" it.[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#cite_note-144][138][/url]
According to a poll of the Crimeans by the Ukrainian branch of Germany's biggest market research organization,
GfK, on January 1622, 2015: "Eighty-two percent of those polled said they fully supported Crimea's inclusion in Russia, and another 11 percent expressed partial support. Only 4 percent spoke out against it. ...Fifty-one percent reported their well-being had improved in the past year."[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#cite_note-poll-145][139][/url]
Bloomberg's Leonid Bershidsky noted that "The calls were made on Jan. 1622 to people living in towns with a population of 20,000 or more, which probably led to the peninsula's native population, the Tatars, being underrepresented because many of them live in small villages. On the other hand, no calls were placed in Sevastopol, the most pro-Russian city in Crimea. Even with these limitations, it was the most representative independent poll taken on the peninsula since its annexation."[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#cite_note-poll-145][139][/url]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#Official_results
