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Back when Russia occupied Crimea after UKR’s Obama-inspired color Revolution (2014), we had a Ukrainian guy working in our IT department and I used to talk to him about it during coffee breaks. He was completely unconcerned and told me the media was lying. “Russia doesn’t want the Crimea,” he would say. I was completely oblivious back then because I was still listening to Fox at the time, so his response made no sense to me. But he was right…It was true that Russia didn’t want the Crimea, but the Crimea didn’t want the Ukraine either. Pooty was protecting that valuable port.

I was completely oblivious back then because I was still listening to Fox at the time, so his response made no sense to me. But he was right…

Back when Kosovo was the dog being wagged, I was talking to a guy from the region who had bought a local business and was exhibiting a similar nonchalance about the situation. He finally decided to get out since it didn't make any difference who was in charge, because "Damn place go BOOM each generation."

Well, Crimea was part of Russia for a longer time than the U.S. was an independent country. The USSR under Stalin relocated the ethnic groups that lived there and moved in Russians. In the 1940s and 1950s, Khrushchev, Ukrainian, worked to transfer Crimea to Ukraine. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/why-did-russia-give-away-crimea-sixty-years-ago "In 1944, when Khrushchev himself was still the Communist Party leader in Ukraine, he reportedly had suggested to Stalin that transferring Crimea to the UkrSSR would be a useful way of winning support from local Ukrainian elites.[2] Regardless of whether Khrushchev actually did bring up this matter with Stalin (the veracity of the secondhand retrospective account is uncertain), it most likely reflects Khrushchev’s own sense as early as 1944 that expanding Ukraine’s territory was a way of gaining elite support in the republic. In particular, Khrushchev almost certainly regarded the transfer of Crimea as a means of securing Kyrychenko’s backing. Khrushchev knew that he could not automatically count on Kyrychenko’s support because the two of them had been sharply at odds as recently as June 1953, when Kyrychenko endorsed Lavrentii Beria’s strong criticism of the situation in western Ukraine — criticism that implicitly attacked a good deal of what Khrushchev had done when he was the leader of the republic in the 1940s. Khrushchev hoped that the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine would dispel the lingering tensions from this episode and thereby help to solidify Kyrychenko’s support in the forthcoming showdown with Malenkov." More at the link.