h***man wrote:
"And now, thanks to Bill Clinton setting the precedent in Kosovo, Russia is free to play another Ossetia scenario...."

As usual we have a well defined, skewed and myopic point of view from the provocateur *(:>*

In 1954, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave Ukraine a gift: Crimea. At the time, it seemed like a routine move, but six decades later, that gift is having .

The transfer merited only a paragraph in Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper, on Feb. 27, 1954. The story was one long sentence and dense with detail. Here's what it said:

"Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet transferring Crimea Province from the Russian Republic to the Ukraine Republic, taking into account the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic ties between Crimea Province and the Ukraine Republic, and approving the joint presentation of the Presidium of the Russian Republic Supreme Soviet and the Presidium of the Ukraine Republic Supreme Soviet on the transfer of Crimea Province from the Russian Republic to the Ukraine Republic."

And with that, a region that had been was "gifted" to Ukraine.

"Gifted" because Khrushchev's transfer was ostensibly to mark the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's merger with the Russian empire. And he probably didn't think the Soviet Union would be gone less than 40 years later.

But, asks Lewis Siegelbaum, a historian at Michigan State University, "what motivated such generosity?" Writing on the website , he says:

"After all, Crimea, the rugged peninsula jutting into the Black Sea, had not become territorially contiguous with Ukraine all of a sudden."

Siegelbaum argues that Crimea's cultural links with Russia were far stronger, and, at the time, there were slightly more than three Russians in Crimea for each Ukrainian. (Stalin had expelled the entire local Tatar population a .)

And, Siegelbaum says, the idea that Crimea and Ukraine had economic similarities, as Pravda noted, was a stretch, since the peninsula was mostly a tourist destination for the rest of the Soviet Union.

There were other reasons for the handover, though.

Ukraine's great famine, or Holodomor, was created by Joseph Stalin, Khrushchev's predecessor; millions died. Stalin died in 1953, and when Khrushchev took over, "the idea was that they really needed to democratize the system, to centralize it less," says Nina Khrushcheva, Khruschev's great-granddaughter and an associate professor of international affairs at The New School in New York.

"It was somewhat symbolic, somewhat trying to reshuffle the centralized system and also, full disclosure, Nikita Khrushchev was very fond of Ukraine," she tells NPR's David Greene. "So I think to some degree it was also a personal gesture toward his favorite republic. He was ethnically Russian, but he really felt great affinity with Ukraine."

haikuman wrote:
Because you are about empty and vacuous spew that begs the mindless dialogue of an
atttttention whhhhore . . . sir
http://edition.cnn.com/