Crimea is an autonomous province but it has no constitutional right to declare independence or join Russia. It was all a sham. The Russians brought in a stooge to head the referendum from a party that had only won 4% of votes before. The Tatars and the Ukrainians ignored the referendum.
About the maps. Many are Russian made and Americans just lap them up. You have to live in Russia to see how shamelessly they lie and distort things in their propaganda campaigns.
The Russians also conveniently include "Russian speakers" with the real ethnic Russians when it suits them to inflate the numbers. When it doesn't, they immediately declare only blond people with names ending in -ov or -in as ethnic Russians.
All Ukrainians can speak Russian fluently and 90 percent of Kiev speak Russian although it is only 10 percent Russian ethnically. Russian is a colonial language. The map shows preference by language, not the actual number of ethnic members of the Russian minority.
In Ireland, people prefer to speak English although some prefer to speak Gaelic. I wonder what a map there would look like. But no one is his right mind would count some Paddy O'Neil as an ethnic Englishman because he speaks English. Imagine if England declared people in Dublin as "ethnic brethren" just because they prefer to speak English, and invade to save them from Gaelic nationalists in the West. That's what Russia is doing.
The ethnic Russians are in Crimea and they are about 60% of the population -- this much is true--because Stalin had kicked out the Tatars and brought the Russians in. When they started complaining about neglect, Khrushchev dumped them on Ukraine to administer them. At that time Ukraine was very wealthy and it built everything in the Crimea.
They had voted for Ukrainian independence in 1991- all was nice and dandy. So what gives now?
The real reason they voted for joining Russia was because they think their salaries will now go up as well as pensions. Yanukovich turned Ukraine, the richest Soviet republic, into a third world sh-thole poorer than El Salvador and more corrupt than Nigeria. Russia seems way better by comparison.
I'm just glad to hear there's some Japanese guys that are still attracted to women.
Their attraction to gaijin women is limited to manga and some closet masturbation. They are not going to Crimea to talk to that girl. Because they are not confident of their English ( which the Crimean Russians cannot speak at all, by the way).
