March 13, 2014

A Few More Crimea Links



The BBC has a series of maps that touch on the political and ethnic history of the peninsula.

Businessweek has an interesting overview of the situation that mentions briefly the CO of the Ukranian naval base in Crimea. Massively outnumbered he was offered the option of a commission in the Russian Navy. He lives in Crimea,, speaks Russian, is an ethnic Russian but took an oath to defend Ukraine until his enlistment is up or he is defeated, so he's declined the offer and is preparing to defend the base (and I imagine get his flotilla ready to break for Odessa).

The Tartars suffered under Stalin nearly as much as the Ukrainians did and are not happy with the upcoming referendum.

A few days old, Cdr Salamander's analysis of some of the lessons from this mess still deserves a read.


Pete Zaitcev reports what he's hearing in Russian language circles in the comments of the previous Crimea thread , though no source is included.

Aw HELL no.

UPDATE: Or...what exactly?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:44 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 175 words, total size 2 kb.

1 I realized that it's a played-out topic, but given your keen interest in matters naval: after Russia captured the one and only Ukrainian submarine, the Ukrainian navy has 2 warships and 11 admirals.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Mon Mar 24 12:45:48 2014 (RqRa5)

2 Which is pretty amazing. When the USSR imploded, I think I remember that Ukraine got half the hulls.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Mon Mar 24 17:14:27 2014 (+rSRq)

3 They skated on the peace dividend for a while. Selling those hulls for scrap bought quite a bit of free medicine and subsidized natural gas (some was stolen, too). Now it's the time to pay. Everyone seems to focus on the brazen aggression by Russia, but Ukraine is in worse condition than the country under Putinomics, and was like that for a while. It's really no wonder that they cannot afford armed forces.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tue Mar 25 16:03:22 2014 (RqRa5)

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