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Piotr Sawicki's avatar

The southern shore of Crimea was ruled directly by the Ottomans (not the vassalized Khanate), and most of the diversity was there (with similar policies, so that doesn't change the conclusions, I'm just nitpicking).

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Roman W 🇵🇱🇺🇦's avatar

"Current Russian propaganda is portraying this transfer as something sinister, erroneous, controversial, or even illegal (as if the decision of the party leaders could ever be illegal in a communist country!). This is a new phenomenon caused by looking for justification of the war - there was no controversy about it as far back as 10 years ago."

There was. According to Plokhy, already in the 90s the Russian parliament declared the transfer of Crimea illegal and claimed Sevastopol for the Russian Federation. Yeltsin also said that "Crimea is Russian" after hearing that it voted, like the rest of Ukraine, for indepence from the USSR. His vice president, Rutskoi, declared in 1992 that the transfer should be reversed. And so on.

They wanted it back for a long time.

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