What happened to the Crimea bridge and why is it important?
What happened to the Crimea bridge and why is it important?
The bridge suffered damage after one of its sections was blown up, killing two people and wounding a child.
Traffic on the single bridge that links Russia to Moscow-annexed Crimea and serves as a key supply route for the Kremlin’s forces in the war with Ukraine came to a standstill on Monday after one of its sections was blown up, killing a couple and wounding their daughter.
The RBC Ukraine news agency reported that explosions were heard on the bridge, with Russian military bloggers reporting two strikes.
RBC Ukraine and another Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda said the attack was planned jointly by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Ukrainian navy, and involved sea drones.
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At this point, any Russian families remaining in Crimea really should leave for their own safety. They know full well they live on stolen land.
Many of them moved there as active contributors to the genocide in that region.
What? Do you have anything that shows the demographics significantly changed at all? The population was 76% russian in 2014 before Russia took it. You have data that shows that significantly increased?
No it was at 67.9%, up from 60.4% in 2001 down from 67% in 1989. Up from 6.6% in 1850 when Russification really started. Also note the suspicious absence of Tatars during the times of the Soviet Union and their return afterwards. And TBH I trust those censuses 2014 onwards about as much as I trust Russian referenda.
Also, "people speak Russian at home" is not, by a long shot, the same thing as "want to be part of Russia" much less "want to live under <currenttsar>'s boot" or "want to suffer yet another Holodomor". Crimea had a referendum just as the rest of Ukraine did and it didn't want to be part of Russia by a good margin. The question of "part of Ukraine or independent" was more split, but that turned towards "part of Ukraine" as Ukraine failed to treat Crimea badly and independence would be difficult for such a small country in such an exposed situation.
And TBH I trust those censuses 2014 onwards about as much as I trust Russian referenda.
Then just speak to some people physically in Crimea? You're on the internet it's not difficult to seek out and have conversations with people in different places in the world.
but that turned towards “part of Ukraine” as Ukraine failed to treat Crimea badly and independence would be difficult for such a small country in such an exposed situation.
Ukraine did treat Crimea badly though? Are you completely unaware of the political turmoil in Ukraine prior to any of this? Increasing ethnic persecution against Russians and finally banning the russian language is what started the separatism in these regions.
Then just speak to some people physically in Crimea? You’re on the internet it’s not difficult to seek out and have conversations with people in different places in the world.
Of course. Because that's totally not something the FSB would do to sniff out partisans and shit. There's a war going on in case you haven't noticed and truth is always its first victim.
Increasing ethnic persecution against Russians and finally banning the russian language is what started the separatism in these regions.
Neither was there prosecution nor was the Russian language banned. The Ukrainian army largely operates in Russian, FFS.
I suggest you have a good look at the reliability of whatever place you get your information from.
It's Russian propaganda, we know where they get their information from.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2014-010539_EN.html
This was put to the EU at the time by a greek parliamentarian that cared about what would happen to greeks in the region. But refers to the law change I am talking about which affected several other ethnic groups.
Why are you quoting a member of the Golden Dawn as if Nazis were a reliable source of information? Are you a Nazbol?
Lmao I had no idea he was to be honest. You're right. Let's get something else then. (And no I'm certainly fucking not.)
A couple of western media articles discussing the split the existing language law was causing in the country:
2000: Ukraine wages war on Russian language
2012: Russian language debate splits Ukraine
2012: Ukrainians(far right) protest against Russian language law
2014(when the law actually occurred): Ukraine Revokes Linguistic Rights
This last one is the most interesting, also 2014 from Time: Many Ukrainians Want Russia To Invade
Within two days of taking power, the revolutionary leaders passed a bill revoking the rights of Ukraine’s regions to make Russian an official language alongside Ukrainian. That outraged the Russian-speaking half of the country, and the ban was quickly lifted. But the damage was done. With that one ill-considered piece of legislation, the new leaders had convinced millions of ethnic Russians that a wave of repression awaited them. So it was no surprise on Friday when a livid mob in Crimea attacked a liberal lawmaker who came to reason with them. Struggling to make his case over the screaming throng, Petro Poroshenko was chased back to his car amid cries of “fascist!”
Remember how that law never went into effect and in fact regions have the right to have secondary official languages? Including Russian?
Also, that it wasn't a law furnishing new modes of repression but a law repealing the granting of rights to minority languages? And the law was by an interim government? And Right Sector and shit massively lost votes after all that?
Yes, Ukraine had a political divide roughly among the Russian/Ukrainian native language rift, caused by Russia (Empire, USSR) by the Russification programme, by Russia (Federation) stoking it with hybrid warfare. Ukraine was torn between going to the west, into the EU (NATO wasn't nearly as popular), or towards Russia's economic bloc. Becoming part of Russia was never on the table, that's always been a small minority position of a minority position.
That very much changed towards majority support for NATO accession after the annexation of Crimea (and, no, Crimeans not being asked doesn't explain the shift), and to absolutely overwhelming after the 2022 invasion.
Russia overplayed its hand. Massively: They could've kept Ukraine in alignment limbo, maybe even have them turn eastwards, but they just had to get greedy and annex and invade. They've also lost all the hybrid warfare opportunities among e.g. the Russian minorities in the Baltic countries.
And maybe you should read more primary sources instead of random Anglo press articles. Or read the articles, for that matter, things like
Lviv's language war was ignited by the death of a popular local folk-singer, Igor Bilozir. At an outdoor cafe one evening in May, he and a friend were playing his Ukrainian ballads while a group of Russian youths at the next table were singing songs in Russian.
The Russians warned Bilozir to stop singing in Ukrainian. He refused. They came to blows. The fighting spilled along the street and the 45-year-old slumped to the ground after a blow to the head. He died three weeks later in hospital, becoming for Ukrainian nationalists an instant martyr.
"He was killed because he sang songs in his own language," says Mr Parubi. Russian newspapers turned things around and said the dispute was over the right to use the Russian language.
which isn't exactly playing into your narrative.
Didn't you, just some comments ago, talk about talking to actual people? I have three Ukrainian families living in neighbouring flats, having fled the war. One of them ethnically Russian, though the kids are refusing to speak the language.
Yes, there had been grievances. Grievances so bad it justifies an invasion? Hell no, not just not the same ballpark, but not even the same galaxy. Moscow, OTOH, is checking all five points (one would suffice!) of the definition of genocide. It doesn't surprise me, or their parents, in any way whatsoever that the kids are refusing to speak Russian, they've seen shit.
Of course. Because that’s totally not something the FSB would do to sniff out partisans and shit. There’s a war going on in case you haven’t noticed and truth is always its first victim.
This is just closed mindedness. You refuse to take on any new information, you have made up your mind what the situation is and utterly refuse to even consider listening to anyone with first hand experience.
Neither was there prosecution nor was the Russian language banned. The Ukrainian army largely operates in Russian, FFS.
No. This is just factually incorrect. The flashpoint that started the separatism was the repeal of the language laws that made Russian (and many others) one of the many state languages in these regions (majority russian ethnicity regions). This occurred in 2014 immediately following the Maidan coup/revolution.
This law change by the new far right bandera supporting government was the final straw in a long line of things that had led up to it, and was what created popular support for violent separatism among the local populations. Many people saw it as existentially important to separate themselves from Ukraine as they believed the Bandera supporters sought to kill or deport them all.
The flashpoint that started the separatism was the repeal of the language laws that made Russian (and many others) one of the many state languages in these regions (majority russian ethnicity regions).
What you're citing there is a question to the Commission, not a research paper. The guy posing that question? A Greek Nazi, becoming MEP on a Golden Dawn ticket. Here's the answer:
The Commission is not aware of any ban on use of minority languages in Ukraine. In February 2014, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted a law, revoking the language policy law of 2012, which has however been effectively vetoed by the then Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov, and therefore has not entered into force.
The law adopted in 2012, giving the local and regional authorities the right to determine regional languages in addition to Ukrainian for contacts with public bodies, has been largely positively assessed by the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe in its opinion. At the same time, the opinion noted: ‘the question remains whether, having regard to the specific situation in Ukraine, there are sufficient guarantees, in the current Draft Law, for the consolidation of the Ukrainian language as the sole State language, and of the role it has to play in the Ukrainian multilinguistic society.’
Yes, the Ukrainian government has been actively trying to make Ukrainian the de facto, not just de jure, lingua franca of Ukraine, to halt secondary effects of Russification.
I'm not even going to address anything else you said. A Tankie relying on hallucinations of a Nazi to make points, how fucking classic.
Learn some research skills and source criticism and then maybe you'll be able to contribute to discussions.
What you’re citing there is a question to the Commission, not a research paper. The guy posing that question? A Greek Nazi, becoming MEP on a Golden Dawn ticket. Here’s the answer:
Yeah this was just pointed out to me. Which is why I went and dug out some other stuff instead, I'm not particularly fond of relying on that one and won't be using it in future.
A couple of western media articles discussing the split the existing language law was causing in the country:
2000: Ukraine wages war on Russian language
2012: Russian language debate splits Ukraine
2012: Ukrainians(far right) protest against Russian language law
2014(when the law actually occurred): Ukraine Revokes Linguistic Rights
This last one is the most interesting, also 2014 from Time: Many Ukrainians Want Russia To Invade
Within two days of taking power, the revolutionary leaders passed a bill revoking the rights of Ukraine’s regions to make Russian an official language alongside Ukrainian. That outraged the Russian-speaking half of the country, and the ban was quickly lifted. But the damage was done. With that one ill-considered piece of legislation, the new leaders had convinced millions of ethnic Russians that a wave of repression awaited them. So it was no surprise on Friday when a livid mob in Crimea attacked a liberal lawmaker who came to reason with them. Struggling to make his case over the screaming throng, Petro Poroshenko was chased back to his car amid cries of “fascist!”
Is this article a hallucination too? This aggressive response is quite unnecessary. Have a more academic conversation.
Yeah this was just pointed out to me.
By me I just couldn't let it stand so I called it out twice, but there's no need to duplicate the whole thread.
Oh lol we're having the same conversation twice? I didn't even notice I often don't look at usernames. Sorry.
There is a loooong road from "has political turmoil" to "wants to be part of Russia."
Florida has political turmoil. Doesn't mean they want to be part of Spain because some people there speak Spanish.
Sure. But I assure you that when russian ethnicity people read twitter and see nafo and other morons (like half this comment section) saying all russians should die blah blah blah it only ends up pushing them to russia for safety. Even Navalny's people who I despise say this:
Like, what do you people expect the russians in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk to think exactly when they read half the shit they've seen from libs on Twitter, reddit, etc etc who have all behaved indistinguishably from fascists in their bloodthirsty calls for russian blood? They see it as attacks on themselves, not the russian army, not putin, they see it as ethnic threats and it has pushed fencesitting russians with family in both ukraine and russia (about half are mixed families) over to the russian side because they just don't feel the west can be trusted. They see them as wanting all russians dead, which you can hardly blame them for with all the behaviour you've surely seen online.
People are mean on the Internet? People are also mad at Russia because they've invaded a neighbor. People were calling out "death to America" for invading Iraq. It's how the world works.
Sure. But the point is that all those ethnic russians in all three of these regions, who are the majority of the population and were the majority before 2014 by a large margin, all have been pushed to russia because of it.
The political reality in these regions is that while before there were some mixed views on the issue, particularly among those with mixed families, now there are almost none among the majority russian ethnic population. Which is something of a problem if you consider yourself to believe in democratic outcomes.
love you mate. they are fascists. wheres moderation here?
Ehh besides the rude ones most of this is alright. I think only 2 people were particularly rude and they got blocked so meh. Some other conversations here actually got quite interesting @[email protected] seems mostly alright once we get off the topic of the war.
You mean that Ukrainians who are ethnically and linguistically Russians and who had been residing in Crimea before the formation of the current Ukraine country should have no political righst nor property ownership rights?
Nope! Not what I meant at all. Hope that clears it up for ya.
Crimea is 76% russian. It was almost 70% russian before 2014 and it is around 76% russian today. Almost all of these people lived there already.
Russian speaking != Russian. A majority in Crimea voted for independence from Russia in 1991 and that desire for independence from Russia did not lessen between 1991 and 2014 when Russia's imperial war of conquest against Ukraine began.
A majority of Russians rose up in opposition against the Ukrainian government during the Ukrainian revolution in support of Russian annexation. You can't just ignore that a large number of people in Crimea were onboard with annexation.
Certainly can, and will! Nothing justifies another country just annexing that territory. Nothing. No amount of you talking will justify it. No number of people there who speak Russian justify it. There is no justification.
So, you don't care about the people or how they feel about anything? So when the people in Crimea felt they were being treated unfairly by the Ukrainian government, they should've just put up with it instead of standing up for themselves? With that attitude, the US would still be a British territory.
You would've sided with the whiskey producers in the whiskey rebellion.
Then do it democratically through referendums. An illegal war is inexcusable. Claiming land is yours because there are people from your country there is textbook fascist strategy.
To offer an example, this was Hitler's basis for invading and annexing the Sudetenland, part of what was then Czechoslovakia.
I'm going to quote this next year when Xi annexes Sakalin.
Russia has been too large for too long, it should have been split into a dozen separate countries centuries ago.
Yeah man, I agree. USA should do so too. Ya know, too big of a country eh? Texas and Florida should separate and California following them as an example. Especially California, I hate California.
It's funny you say that, because both California and texas each have a larger GDP than russia by themselves.
Of course that was before the catastrophic failure of a war, now I'm sure Russia's smaller than Florida too.
BTW, it's pronounced "Knee-how", just to help you for next year.
And they just magically had Russian military uniforms and heavy equipment...
Sure. But that doesn't really change the census data much.
This applies to Donetsk and Luhansk too. All three of these regions were ethnic majority Russian, and the separatism kicked off when the Maidan government banned the Russian language in official government usage (schools, local institutions etc).
As others have pointed out, Crimea is not 82% Russian. The majority of the populace speaks Russian, but a shared language does not indicate a shared culture. They don't want to be part of Russia, and were illegally invaded.
Crimea wasn't "invaded". Russia was already there as it leased the port and officially managed it for military use already. That's why there was no fighting. They already ran the checkpoints, they already were the entire military presence in the region. The changeover from "this is Ukraine" to "this is Russia now" was entirely the signing of papers and changed absolutely nothing about the presence in the region or the average day to day. They certainly took it over, but to say it was invaded is somewhat misleading, more of a "we've decided that this is ours now".
This is a gross and flagrant distortion of events in Crimea leading up to the illegal annexation. It leaves out the fact that the operation of the checkpoints was still subject to Ukrainian governmental oversight, the fact that prior to the take-over, Russia illegally brought soldiers in unmarked uniforms over the border (the "little green men"), and the fact that the "changeover" was far from violence-free, let alone just a "signing of papers."
The denial of reality going on here is absurd. Pre 2014 I know they operated the checkpoints because I went to Crimea for 2 weeks in 2009. I'm not saying that there wasn't also fuckery involved but denying the reality of events is nonsensical. There is even a vice documentary that shows just how casual the transition was. It's extremely painful discussing these topics with people online whose only understanding of these regions comes through the lens of this war.
I never said Russia didn't operate the checkpoints. But prior to 2014, Crimea was indisputably Ukrainian territory, and Russia operated security checkpoints inside Ukraine at Ukraine's discretion.
No one is claiming that the annexation of Crimea involved violence at the scale of the current war, but it was not non-violent, either. Characterizing it as just "signing of papers" is false.
It’s extremely painful discussing these topics with people online whose only understanding of these regions comes through the lens of this war.
What other lens should we look at the annexation through? It was clearly the early stages of this war.
I'm not saying it wasn't Ukrainian territory. I'm saying that the presence there was 100% russian military because it was functionally operated as their military port.
This is precisely why there was no battle over it, no deaths, no nothing. Just "this is russia now" and continued operation of it as they always had but with different flags.
What other lens should we look at the annexation through? It was clearly the early stages of this war.
I'd much prefer a non-war lens of the place and how cool it is. Most people in america hadn't even heard of it until the annexation, it's very unfortunate.
I don't think calling it the early stages of this war is quite accurate but it's not really that important and kinda gets into unnecessary semantics. The war probably wouldn't be happening if the Minsk agreement had been kept. Russia were never going to let Crimea go because they needed it as a military port but they avoided Donetsk and Luhansk up until the Minsk agreement failed. If they had taken these regions in 2014 it would have been a breeze for them as Ukraine had no military to speak of, which is why the civil war was fought by the nazi volunteer batallions (azov, right sector, etc etc). Ukraine's military was ramped up between 2014 and 2021. They did not really have much of anything until the 2016 Stategic Defense Bulletin followed by the State Program for the Development of the Armed Forces (2017-2020). In 2014 the military was only 90k active personnel with over half being civilian staff.
We'd all prefer a non-war lens of Crimea. You're right, it was a cool and interesting place, and hopefully still will be when the war is over.
But Russia has no say over whether another country's territory will be used as Russia's military port. The fact is, Ukraine was amenable to hosting Russia's military there, so long as Russia didn't try to actually own the land, but they've forfeited their right to use it now.
Ultimately, Russia's military will be ousted from Crimea along with the rest of Ukraine, and that will be that. Had they never annexed it or escalated to open warfare, they would still be operating there freely today, with a much friendlier Ukraine happily hosting them.
I uhh. Don't share your optimism or actually care who runs it, I only really care that the people I know there remain safe. For them and for myself the flag be waved around is somewhat meaningless compared to the human impact of all this nonsense, particularly because some of my socialist friends are gone now. With that said I don't see Crimea changing hands again, nor does anyone I have spoken to currently in Crimea. I might change that assessment if the counteroffensive ever actually sees the first line of dragon's teeth but so far it's been completely underwhelming. Everyone also sees the deployment of clusterbombs as a "let's salt the earth so it's worthless to them" move rather than anything that will change the counteroffensive's prospects.
There is an easy way to end the war: Russian withdrawal. It really is as simple as that.
At any point in history Russian Federation had no right or business to occupy any part of Ukraine. It was up to Ukraine to decide what to do with those areas.
While we all want the war to stop, it cannot be done at any price. Ukraine must be allowed to return the areas stolen from it and Russia must return to pre 2014 borders. Either they do it willingly or with force. No one likes it, but it's Russia that chose to attack, not Ukraine.
I hope your friends are safe, but at the same time I hope they have the sense to leave Crimea until things settle.
And let's hope for peace, but recognize that it cannot be achieved by giving into the offender's demands.
This is an ethnic argument, further pointing to the idea that you are making distinctly fascist points in this thread.
It is impossible to talk about a genocide without talking about ethnicity. Stop being so pigheaded. I'm going to block you now.