Crimea begged for help from Mother Russia. The nazis in Kiev were going to strip away their autonomy and ban all languages other than Ukrainian. And they held a referendum.
We're talking ethnic Russians in both Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. It was the west that pulled off the coup with US and EU support.
Oh and btw no one can seem to come up with pictures for the "invasions". No pictures. In this day and age.
Commies whining about Nazis....hilarious!!!
Crimeans and eastern Ukrainians aren't commies. BUT the west loves their Nazis. You don't know the history of western Ukraine? Like the time they commited genocide in Poland in WWII.
Or had a death camp that was nicknamed the Holocaust of Bullets. Or that their hero Stepan Bandera fought with the Nazis.
Bandera is even buried in Germany and the west still considers him a hero.
Hey, if you say Nazi enough, can Putin invade all of Eastern Europe? DERP!
Give me a break. Putin hasn't invaded jack shit.
On the other hand with Obama. Let's see he installed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, took out Gaddafi and left Libya to terrorists, assisted the coup in Ukraine and overthrew a duly elected President and his party, then decided he had to help Saudi Arabia and Qatar overthrow Assad and gave the world ISIS.
Don't talk to me about Putin being the bad monster when Obama with the help of his hawks on the R side of the aisle have unleashed living hell in the ME.
Give me a break. Putin hasn't invaded jack shit.
Except he admitted it.
Don't talk to me about Putin being the bad monster when Obama
Oh, Obama was an incompetent asshole, so we have to let Putin invade all his neighbors.
DERP!
You really believe in this Russia is the boogey man shit don't you? One man died. Putin does not want the rest of the Ukraine. He is leaving them to croak on their own. He only wanted Crimea and they wanted Russia. As far as the eastern rebels, he's helping like Obama helped so called rebels in Syria. Pity Obama's rebels turned out to be terrorists but that's a whole different thread.
"The council took a vote: Only Turchynov was in favor of declaring a state of war. And that was that: Russia held a spurious referendum in Crimea and took it over. The Ukrainian government gave up without a fight because it was scared of losing the entire country.
It is inconceivable that Putin didn’t know how weak Ukraine was. He had access to intelligence from the neighboring country. He could even talk directly to the deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych, who had just fled to Russia. Nothing prevented a Russian invasion.
Moreover, Putin didn’t need an additional pretext to step in: Russia had already declared the overthrow of Yanukovych an “anti-constitutional coup” — which, technically, it was, though the ex-president’s oppressive regime had little regard for the constitution.
It could have gotten Yanukovych to sign the kind of request for assistance that serves as a basis for Russia’s current military action in Syria.
Yet Putin didn’t do any of that. He didn’t want to invade the rest of Ukraine and deal with the momentous international consequences
He only wanted Crimea, the Russian navy base populated mainly by pro-Moscow Russian speakers. Yatsenyuk had no illusions about Crimeans when he talked about the possibility of an “ethnic conflict.”
Later, when Russia backed a separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine — providing military advisers, weapons and, eventually, troops — Putin was just as careful to avoid a full-scale invasion, even though he could have crushed the Ukrainian military.
In fact, even though Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has boasted that his military is now “the strongest in Europe,” Russia still has an overwhelming advantage in numbers, equipment and training.
Throughout the conflict, Putin has never been constrained by any threat of Ukrainian pushback. He doesn’t want overt control of this or any neighbouring country, just political and economic influence.
In Ukraine, he wants to cripple the country enough that the West will be wary of taking it in, integrating it into European institutions. So far, that plan is working: Ukraine remains destitute and riven by internal strife. "
Leonid Bershidsky: Why Putin stopped at Crimea
