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Comment by theBobBob | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious has something like that ever happened. A country was conquered, then won independence and then at a later point, decided to "rejoin" them.

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Crimea kind of did that. They were conquered by Russia ~200 years ago, won independence with the Ukraine and then wanted to rejoin with Russia.

It happened thanks to massive deportations of Soviet Union which changed whole social structure of Crimea.

People who got conquered and who rejoined have not a single connection.

Well they tried that trick in Ireland too, I'm not sure if the scale was different or if the later wars undid the progress.

This is a slightly one eyed view of what's going on. What would you call the related events in Ukraine? There are plenty of other invasions that have been called reunifications or similar. Attacking a neighbour is quite different to a two state, democratic decision to join.

The bottom line is that most crimeans were in favour of reunification with Russian. The Ukraine government consistently blocked them from voting on the matter.

Putin doesn't do much I'd agree with, but I think he was the good guy here.

That's incorrect. The election on the issue made them part of Ukraine (90's) rather than Russia and polling since has been consistently similar. The more recent faux referendum is universally condemned as a sham.

For dubious values of "wanted". Russian troops literally seized the Crimean parliament building and forced MPs to vote to hold a referendum on it at gunpoint, and the referendum itself was questionable due to being held under Russian military occuption (not to mention illegal).

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