This March marks 5 years since the people of Crimea overwhelmingly voted in favour of reunification with the rest of Russia. This event was preceded by a violent Western-sponsored coup d’etat in Ukraine, which removed there the legitimate government and left Ukraine without any constitutional government for several months. De facto Ukraine was ruled by the US/EU-approved Ukro-Nazi mob, which saw as its mission eradication of everything Russian in Ukraine. And Crimea stood high on their list of territories to be depopulated from the Russians.

USA had its own interests in Crimea, having scouted it for its new US-NATO military base. Crimea would have become another Kosovo for the US-NATO, Kosovo, which was split off from Serbia in a savage aggression on Yugoslavia by the US-NATO in March 1999 and lead to the establishment one of the largest US-NATO military bases in Europe – Camp Bondsteel, which Graham Phillips documented in his latest reportage.

And then “The Third Siege of Crimea” – as the locals call it, the longest 25-year-long siege, ended and Crimea reunited with its motherland!

The Crimeans overwhelmingly voted for the reunification, exercising their right under the international law and the UN charter of people’s right to self-determination. It was not the first time the Crimeans voted for the reunification, but this time it worked, while in 1991 the results were ignored and suppressed.

Whatever passed between Russia and Ukraine in 1954, it was not sovereignty over Crimea. The Union States did not have sovereignty over the autonomous bodies within them. The USSR had sovereignty over both of them. According to the Constitution the Supreme Soviet would determine the fate of the autonomies if a state seceded.

USSR Law of Secession: “The people residing in the autonomies are given a right to independently decide whether to remain in the Soviet Union or in the seceding Republic as well as to decide on their state legal status.”

Crimean Referendum Jan. 20, 1991: “Do you support re-establishing the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as a subject of the Union SSR and a participant of the Union Treaty?”

— 94.3% yes —

As 2.5 million Crimeans celebrated, the West was gnashing its collective teeth as the loss of a prospective military base for the USA to put their missiles aimed at Moscow. Sanctions followed, trying to punish the Crimeans for their choice. Ukraine, with the Western blessing, blew up the electric power lines as well as left the peninsular without water, leading to a large-scale humanitarian disaster. No-one bombed the Obama regime for organising it, but Russia rather quickly managed to restore both water and power to the peninsular through a dedicated infrastructure bridge.

More sanctions followed from the West. The Russians felts especially betrayed by the Germans – only in 1989 Gorbachev, against the strategic interests of the USSR, and to the hollow NATO promises of “not one inch East of Berlin”, green-lighted the reunification of the German people. And that is how the Germans repaid when the Russian people reunified – by slapping on sanctions.

Time passed, and Russia continued to undo the damage done to Crimea by the 25 years of Ukrainian neglect. They built new infrastructures, built new international airport, built a large mosque for the Crimean Tatars and recognised their language as one of the three official languages in Crimea (something Ukraine promised to do, but never did), they built the miracle of engineering – the Kerch railway and motor bridge, they restored Artec.

Looking back at 2014, when this revival started, I found my copy of Argumenty i Fakty from the 18th of March 2014, which I keep as a valuable memento – akin to how our grandfathers would have kept newspapers announcing the end of WWII. Here is the facsimile of its front page.

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