Since Crimea is now all over the news I’d like to point out a big piece of information that seems to be lacking in the main stream press coverage of the region.

Crimea used to be populated by the Tatar people, a Muslim people of Turkic origin. Ever since the Russian Empire seized Crimea in the late 1700s and through the years culminating in a big, big way by Stalin and the Soviet Union the Tatar people have been forced into exile/deported, killed by the hundreds of thousands, and then finally the remaining hundreds of thousands of survivors exiled to the edge of the Siberian/Uzbeki wasteland to form present day “Tatarstan” (which is not an independent country).

The Russians then moved in became the vast majority. But only after all this ethnic cleansing.

After the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 independent Ukraine invited the native Tatars back to Crimea and many did come back (not only was it their ancestral homeland it is also a lot warmer in Crimea!). In the last 20 years Crimea was slowly rebuilding its Tatar population but by now Russians owned a lot of fancy property there and have a large naval base there. So, to me, this is just a 2014 version of the continuing genocide the Russians have inflicted on the Tatars in Crimea over the last 200+ years.

And it kinda proves once and for all Putin really is a big dick.

For more information on Crimean history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatars