Russia will try to bang him off, or poison him, for ever.
He’s worth of the order of 20M, from his media etc work.
Amongst others, yes. KFOR has protected the peace between Serbia and others in that region.
No. KFOR protects only Kosovo. Before that UN was unsuccessfully tried to protect Croatia and especially Bosnia from Serbian aggression 1991-1995 with UNPROFOR.
The UN rules of engagement are generally completely useless. They will happily sit there and watch one population kill another population, in their thousands.
It is only when something big blows up, and the US pushes a resolution through the UNSC (having bought off Russia and China under the table to merely abstain) that the US gets involved militarily and then things happen.
I cannot see the UN playing a useful part in ending this conflict. It will need a military resolution one way or another, or complete exhaustion of both combatants in which case it will end in a dangerous stalemate that can flare up anytime.
Whatever happens we can be sure that Erdogan will try hard to make poo poo all over for whatever selfish reason. In a new interview with Stoltenberg it’s clear that Finland and Sweden already are de facto members of NATO because most other NATO countries have made bilateral letters of agreements. Their official status is as invited, meaning they participate in all political meetings and becomes integrated into the military structure.
But I think Crimea will be a hard nut. The only reasonable solution is they become independent in some way IMO. It’s not clear that it “belongs” to Ukraine. When it did, Ukraine did hard to try to “Ukrainify” it the same way the Russians are “Russifying”. Amongst other things making Ukrainian the only official language, even though only a tiny minority speaks Ukrainian. Most speak Russians and Crimean Tatar. Ukraine has failed miserably in giving back the land and rights of the Crimean Tatars who were expelled from their homes and land by Lenin.
already are de facto members of NATO because most other NATO countries have made bilateral letters of agreements
→ Turkey
Most speak Russians and Crimean Tatar
I seem to remember a Ukrainian colleague telling me that Ukrainian isn’t the main language in most of Ukraine, Russian is…
skydriller wrote:
I seem to remember a Ukrainian colleague telling me that Ukrainian isn’t the main language in most of Ukraine, Russian is
You either remember incorrectly, or your Ukrainian colleage was – to put it mildly – misinformed.
When asked in the 2001 census [latest published] to name ONE primary language, here are the results:
Ukrainian:
Russian:
So the only three regions with a clear nuber of people with Russian as primary language are – Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea.
This does not mean that these regions are mostly populated by “ethnic Russians”, or people who “want to join Russia”. Far from it – here are the reults of the Ukrainian independence referndum held in 1991:
Crimea and Sevastopol were borderline around 55%, but every other region was at 83% or above.
Of course in a country with two different languages, lots of people speak both, but the pattern here is also quite insteresting:
Almost everyone can speak in Ukrainian (dark magenta bar). In Donetsk and Luhansk there was a small minority of people who say they don’t speak Ukrainian; Crimea stands out with the majority NOT able to speak Ukrainian. That was 20 years ago, so most likely there are more Ukrainian speakers now in all of them.
In several provinces, especially in the east and Crimea, nearly everyone speaks Russian (dark Cyan bar), but the further you go west the less.
Cobalt wrote:
skydriller wrote: I seem to remember a Ukrainian colleague telling me that Ukrainian isn’t the main language in most of Ukraine, Russian is
I heard the same.
Cobalt wrote:
Almost everyone can speak in Ukrainian (dark magenta bar).
Question is what kind of Ukrainian language? Heard from my Ukrainian colleagues that most people from the East speak very bad one, so they are just told “speak Russian”, even these days.
Crimea is a bit like Alsace-Lorraine or South Tyrol, a region between two countries that is heavily influenced by both. Who owns it depends a lot on the turning tides of history, but it will invariably always be connected to both in some way.
However, like with Danzig I don’t think turning it into an independent or internationally supervised region will solve the conflict around it. I could only imagine it as an independent entity if Russia itself fractures into smaller states, which is not a wholly impossible but an unlikely scenario.
