It has been a long time since the last Crimean war (1850s) which was (for the main) triggered by France and Britain in order to prevent Russia from gaining power in the Mediterranean (ref. wiki). The muslim Ottoman empire was in the alliance against the orthodox christian Russian empire. There was the memorable Charge of the Light Brigade. There were the Caucasian campaigns, the Baltic and even the Pacific ones. Russia lost the war and the rights to keep a naval fleet at Sevastopol.
Since history repeats in funny ways, Russia is standing up for Syria and now will send troops to Crimea to protect Russian naval interests. The EU, USA and the sovereign state of Ukraine is in opposition. The muslim Tatars in Crimea are expected to resist the Russian transplants (Tatars were evicted from Crimea by force during the Soviet era). These are truly good times to fight another war.
Russia’s upper house of parliament on
Saturday approved a proposal by President Vladimir Putin to deploy Russian
armed forces in Ukraine’s Crimea region. The Federation Council voted
overwhelmingly to back a proposal to use “the armed forces of the Russian
Federation on the territory of Ukraine until the normalisation of the
socio-political situation in that country.” It said the decision took
effect immediately.
Ukraine accused Russia of sending thousands of extra troops to Crimea, largely
hostile to the Kiev government which emerged from the overthrow of
president Viktor Yanukovich last weekend. It placed its military in
the area on high alert.
regards
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Brown Pundits Archive
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
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