The point is, it has been a Russian Navy base, continually, for 238 years. And no cute end-run neocon move of funding and launching a coup in Kiev was -ever- going to get them to vacate it for NATO to take over the base.
It was retarded of DC to ever think that was in the cards.
Many significant people groups and nations have claimed Crimea as territory over time. This includes Ukraine. As well, even Moscow is aware of, and recognized Crimea as geographic Ukrainian territory, both historically, and in modern history.
However, as a key to the greater regional strategic goal, Moscow cannot and will not let this go.
Since Catharine the Great rested control from the Ottoman Turks, *Sevastopol (at times autonomous within Crimea) has remained home of Russia’s Southern Navy, and home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
However taking a look at both points in modern history, from 1921 the Crimean Peninsula was an *Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic until 1945, becoming a Russian SSR Oblast (1945–1954), before being re-patriated as a whole to the Ukrainian SSR (1954–1991), for the first time since the Mongol invasion.
Again, in 1991 the territory of Sevastopol City was complicated, and made an *Autonomous Republic within Crimea, as it was home to both the Russian Navy and Ukrainian Navy - within independent Crimean Ukraine... at least on paper.
•However, as was Soviet pre-planned, no CIS member country was formally or practically independent from CIS battle space, economic space, or security space, under CIS HQ in Moscow, as some will continue to find out the hard way.
Ukraine and Russia have danced around the strategic jurisdiction of Sevastopol, which is again directly tied to the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Many analysts would argue, much more challenging efforts would have been needed for Moscow to re-take Crimea in 2014, (a fundamental and critically necessary piece of both Moscow’s strategic ME energy and East Asian trade route control to the EU (Red Sea and Suez), and the goal of EU dependency, IF Bill Clinton hadn’t done Moscow’s bidding, and forced Ukraine to give up its nukes back to Russia, in exchange for a promise of Western defense.
Today, Russia is now claiming nearly half the Black Sea as its territorial waters, claiming it’s very rich and (Ukrainian energy discovery and infrastructure), and Sevastopol (now directly and efficiently tied to it’s Southern Military District (Kerch Strait Bridge), and has largely strategically postured itself, and taken control of what is “to date” a yet shared Eastern Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, and Gulf of Aden.