IceBuddha wrote:Rio Cana wrote:Ukraine is a big problem because most of its territory was created via forced Soviet annexation from neighboring nations that had no choice. In reality, the Russian Soviets were the ones pulling the strings. Ukraine was to become a buffer state for Russia. Good plan but the Russians outsmarted themselves. Instead of attaching those forcibly annexed territories to Ukraine they should have attached them directly to Russia. Crimea was always Russian until one of its leaders decided to illegally gift it to Ukraine. Chances are that if he had known Ukraine would one day leave that he would not have gifted Crimea to Ukraine. So its 2017, the Russians seem to be trying to set right what they now consider the mistaken decisions of previous Soviet politicians. Mistakes which today they consider has created for them major security problems since Ukraine is no longer a buffer State under there control like in Soviet times. After all, back then annexing those territories was all about creating a buffer zone for Russia.
The problem with all of those irredentist/ethnonationalist claims over Crimea is that Russia recognized Crimea as a part of Ukraine by treaty (including the Belavezha Accords, the Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Partition Treaty on the Status and Conditions of the Black Sea Fleet). It's just meaningless rhetoric designed to justify military aggression and expansionism.
But anyway, the fact that Ukraine will never return to being a friendly state is one of the big disbenefits of Russia's Ukraine policy. They completely destroyed any chance of a working relationship or solidarity with Ukraine. I don't see relations ever returning to normal after this. Sure, they get to retain their Black Sea Fleet base, but at what cost in the long term? No one held a gun to their head and made them resort to such extreme measures.
Instead of courting the Ukrainians into SCO they resorted to simple opportunism when the civil war broke out.