Was the process of a joining the the USSR ever a willingly thing a country could choose to do or not to do?
AFAIK, the process was something more like Russian army invades your country and says "Congrats comrades, you are now liberated and part of the Soviet Union", rather than "Hey, would you like to have a democratic vote on joining our Soviet Union? No hard feelings if you don't want to, we can still be friends."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Austrian_Anschluss_refere...
The same "international community" lead by a number of imperialist and colonialist countries still at the time maintaining protectorates and colonies all around the world whose local populations fought with huge toil for their independece?
That would be like the pot recognizing and verifying the validity of the kettle's blackness...
OK, touché! True, most of Europe was a mess back then, with every country trying to establish an empire or defend itself from being invaded by one. There weren't many countries you could count on for an independent perspective. You had to be pro $SOME_EMPIRE and against $SOME_OTHER_EMPIRE. Unless you were Switzerland, there was no middle-ground option.
If you're looking to history - this event mirrors Kosovo, just with roles reversed. An ethnic minority, geographically isolated, within Serbia declare their independence. This is rejected by Russia and backed by the US who ensures forces are on the ready to "enforce" Kosovo's independence. The big difference is that the one remained relatively peaceful with no further largescale escalation. Ukraine, by contrast, was determined to retake Crimea and clearly had the full backing of the West. So, in many ways, this war started 9 years ago.
[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-a...
With the "minor" difference that Serbia was committing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, while no such thing happened in Crimea.
> The big difference is that the one remained relatively peaceful with no further largescale escalation. Ukraine, by contrast, was determined to retake Crimea and clearly had the full backing of the West.
That's completely false. Crimean border has been more peaceful than Kosovo-Serbia border.
It should be unsurprising that the folks who stayed tend to be the folks who support the Russian annexation. The opinion of those who fled matters, too.
We can look at past populations though. [1] Ethnic Ukrainians have never been more than a sizable minority in Crimea. Their peak was 26.5% in 1970. And indeed there was a sharp drop in Ukrainians from 2001 to 2014 (going from 24% to 16%), though that was following a downward trend from the 1989 to 2001 census as well.
So if we take a high end estimate and say the real number was 25% Ukrainian, you'd still likely end up with a poll result of ~74% instead of 83%.
I'm skeptical of any referendum of a large group of people that gets a 96.77% result. Mr. Rogers wouldn't poll that high.
It's unclear whether they're saying 96% of Tatar's supported Russia, or "only" 60%. I'd assume the latter for balance, but the writing sure does suggest the former. In either case it's the same story. The reason for the absurdly high poll numbers overall is that ethnic Ukrainians boycotted the referendum.
After they had forced their military bases on us, there were elections where only one candidate for each district was allowed and of course only candidates who supported the soviet union could be elected, it was a totally fake election. Then the new "parliament" voted to join the soviet union. So some stupid russians still say "but you joined voluntarily!!" and so on.
It was a process with people both greatly against it and enthustiastically for it in the local populations, does that count?