It was never about "soft power" influence the author and other media usually talk but about a lot of people being tired of poverty, corruption, and power abuse.
It was never about "American government winning hearts" but about Russian government sending caskets to Ukrainian families. I saw many neutral folks who became pro-West because of the attack on their homeland.
The mafia-run local government (and a good chunk of the Russian-speaking population) had no problem with it, you mean.
I’m Russian, born there, grew up there. I haven’t been in Russia since 2012. And I’d rather be dead than visit Russia ever again.
Speaking of Crimea, pre-war opinion polls are available. One of them tells us only 38% of Crimea residents wanted to join Russia: http://www.km.ru/world/2012/09/14/polozhenie-russkoyazychnog...
First: did the residents of Crimea prefer to be part of Ukraine or part of Russia?
Second: should residents of a region have the right to declare independence (or annex themselves to another country) without getting permission from the government of their current country?
The US fought a bloody war 150 years ago to settle this issue (no, US states do not have the right to leave). But they followed a different policy on Kosovo.
The Russians have been happy to recognize the right of Abkhazia and Crimea to determine their own path, but didn't grant the same rights to Chechnya (or recognize the split of Kosovo from Serbia).
China, with Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong on its mind, did not show any support for Crimea's move to Russia.
As long as "their own path" means being part of Russia. Had there been any political force even talking about any other path, they'd be swiftly suppressed, it's a felony in Russia to promote secession.
I would guess that it's a felony only if you promote secession from Russia. For instance, people living in Russia are playing some kind of role in the California secession movement ("Calexit") [1].
[1] http://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Advocate-s-Russi...
1) What happens to the private property owned by citizens of Ukraine? Citizens of Russia? Citizens of a random third-party country?
2) How is government property transferred? There's some obvious non-commercial real estate here (parks, beaches) as well as commercial (government buildings)? What happens to a property publicly financed by bonds (stadiums, airports, railroads) or other mechanisms?
3) How's national debt handled? Crimea historically attracted more government subsidies than the tax revenues collected, so in a sense it played quite a significant role in formation of that debt. Do certain obligations by Ukrainian government get marked as Crimean, pending the bondholders' approval? Does the working group define some pro rata share of the debt everyone agrees on? Or does Crimea gets to start with a clean slate, while Ukraine gets stuck (ha-ha!) with the bills accummulated over the decades?
Even with an amicable separation some of those issues could take years to figure out (Grexit and Brexit being good examples of complexity). Complete absence of any work in this matter shows that Russia was less interested in establishing its rule of law over Crimea and more in destabilizing its parent entity.
Kiev is indeed awesome place to visit however you should be a desperate guy to move there not being slav.
They didn't "just ask", of course. A visit by 3,000 or so "vacationing" soldiers from a certain large, neighboring country had something to do with it also.
> Crimeans just asked for the same right against Ukraine as Ukrainians asked against Russia.
Ukraine and Russia both declared independence from the USSR in the months before the USSR was officially dissolved in 1991 [1]. In Soviet times, Ukraine was not part of Russia; they were both constituent "Republics" of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with the right to secede from the USSR, under the USSR constitution. They both exercised this right, but it is not correct that Ukraine asked for independence from Russia, since it was not part of Russia.
As for "help from western friends", President Bush in Kiev, in 1991, before Ukraine left the USSR, warned the Ukrainians against "suicidal nationalism"; he refused to meet with leaders of the pro-independence movement [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...