Crimea is Russian. Why?

Historically, Crimea is not Russian and not Ukrainian, it’s the Tatar land that Russia "took on bayonets" at the end of the 18th century: in full accordance with the norms of that time, but contrary to modern international law denying the acquisition of territories by War.

Russia has tried to acquire the Crimea for a long time. The most famous are the campaigns of  Duke Vasily Golitsyn (1687 and 1689) and Field-Marshal Burchard Minich (1735). In the latter case, Bakhchisaray was even able to temporarily occupy.

Each time the stumbling block turned out to be heat and waterlessness. Tatars knew how to find water for people and horses in the steppe, but Russians do not.

To conquer the Crimea, it was required, firstly, to create a fleet, and secondly, to inflict a sensitive defeat on Turkey in order to force it to abandon the protectorate over the Crimea.

In 1774, according to the Kuchuk-Kainarji world, Istanbul renounced the suzerain rights to the peninsula. Seven years later, the Khanate, left without external support and blocked from the sea and land, agreed to join Russia without a fight.

In 1787, Catherine II undertook a grandiose "Tavricheskiy voyage" in the company of the Austrian Emperor Joseph. In one place, the horse Tatars raced in one place to the monarch's cortege, uttering piercing cries and waving sabers. The Empress began to flirt: oh, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, now these savage people will seize us and sell us into slavery! Joseph smiled thinly: "I do not think that Duke Potemkin gave them such an order."

Russia had a strong moral trump: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through Perekop, according to various sources, from two to five million Ukrainian, Polish and Russian slaves captured in raids passed with a lasso around their necks.

The south-east of modern Ukraine was called "Wild Field". Soils and climate were such that stick a stick into the ground - the tree will grow, but to settle there meant to play with death.

So, according to the modern historian Andrei Burovsky, if today the Crimean Tatar throws himself in the face of the Russian: "Colonizer!", He can just as easily get away with it: "The slave trade!".

On the other hand, it is not right to represent the Khan's Crimea as a kind of a predatory nest. On the peninsula there was a developed agriculture and craft.

At the end of the 17th century, the strengthening of Moscow put an end to the raids, and the Khanate existed for another 100 years, and nothing happened to its economy.

After the annexation of the Crimea to the island, immigrants rode massively, both from Great Russia and from the Little Russian provinces (Now it is the territory of modern Ukraine), especially, for some reason, Chernigov.

The most famous hero of the Sevastopol Defense in 1853-1855 after the admirals Kornilov and Nakhimov - scout-plastman Pyotr Koshka, an ethnic Ukrainian.

Predominantly Russian in ethnic composition, the Crimea became the result of the postwar military labor force from the devastated Central Russia.

February 19, 1954 Khrushchev decided to transfer the Crimea from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian SSR. By the standards of  Western democracy, the transfer of the Crimea really looks doubtful: there was no referendum, no voting at the plenary session of the parliament, no public discussion. But the Soviet legislation and the current practice of that time it fully corresponded. This gesture, however, had no significance for the population of the peninsula, who considered themselves 100% Russian.

The fact that the population of the Crimea broke with Ukraine during the referendum in 2014 became the implementation of the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, enshrined in the UN Charter. One can draw a one hundred percent parallel between this plebiscite and the rupture of Norway with Sweden in 1905 and the rupture of the population of the various colonies with their European metropolises in the first decades after World War II.

The fact that practically everyone in the Crimea supports reunification with Russia is confirmed by the results of recognized opinion polls. In a poll conducted by the US Center Pew Research Center in May 2014, 91% of the population said that the referendum on withdrawing from Ukraine in March of the same year was free and fair. 88% of respondents said that the government in Kiev should respect the results of the popular vote. These figures coincide with the official results of the referendum on the withdrawal from Ukraine, when 96.7% (in Sevastopol 95.6%) voted for withdrawal, with a turnout of 83.1%.