“Getting Russia out of Crimea will be like getting Mexico out of the Yucatán. Everyone will have to be exterminated.”
Your analogy would have some credibility if Mexico had ceded Yucatan to Guatemala, then wanted it back.
Yeah, Russians have been beating up people over Crimea for a very long time. When I went to Crimea in the late 2000s, people only spoke Russian, not Ukranian. I drove over and looked at the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, it was all rusted up and crappy looking. Just east of there are the ruins where the Greeks set up shop some millenniums ago. No Greeks there now. Most of the housing on the south coast was set up like second homes or summer holiday hotels for Russians - basically it is (or was) their Florida. The airport near Simferopol and the office buildings there were all full of Russian speakers. The only people who did not speak Russian were the Khazakis who had returned from their diaspora after exile by Stalin. The town of Yalta, where Stalin, Churchill and FDR met and carved up Europe near the end of WW2, is the site of the Czar’s Livadia Palace (summer palace) since the 1860s. During the Crimean War, in 1854, the British Cavalry (entering Crimea to protect Turkish interests) got their asses handed to them at Balaklava (a valley I drove through between Yalta and Sevastopol) by the Russians in the disastrous “Charge of the Light Brigade” led by Lord Cardigan. Nobody wants to be the Noble 600 again.
The parallels with Crimea and Afghanistan are remarkable as far as foreign intervention. It is hard to understand why Nikita Khruchev (a Russian who supposedly loved Ukraine) in 1954 transferred the Crimean Oblast to Ukraine dominion, and then why did Gorbachev give Crimea to Ukraine when USSR disintegrated, except that perhaps because Gorbachev was 1/2 Ukraininan and wanted a place to escape to that was not under Russian flag, after being the last Soviet leader. Crimea is just a completely different place than Kiev, which is the other place where I worked while in Ukraine.
The Charge of the Light Brigade
BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
I
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
II
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
III
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred.
IV
Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
V
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!