Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war on February 24, 2022, the war has lasted for nearly a year, and every major event in this world is not just accidental, but interlocking, and the causes and consequences of the events are traceable.
The war that is still raging today was actually foreshadowed as early as 2014, and it can be traced further back to the former Soviet Union and even Tsarist Russia.
Behind all these events is closely around an extremely critical region - "Crimea".
Crimea has an ice-free port - the port of Sevastopol.
Located at the southwestern tip of the Crimean peninsula, the port of Sevastopol has the advantage of being freezing-free all year round, and it is also a natural harbor with complete port facilities.
This ice-free port is of great strategic value to Russia, which has historically paid a huge price for the defense of the port of Sevastopol.
At the same time, Crimea is a peninsula on the dark northern coast, and Russia's Caucasus is very dependent on oil transportation through the Black Sea, and the loss of Crimea means the loss of control of the Black Sea, then Russia's economic lifeline to Eastern Europe will be cut off.
As the salient of the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea region, mastering the port of Sevastopol means grasping the initiative in the Black Sea area, which can be attacked, retreated, and defended.
Once lost, it means that Russia will be powerless in the face of the blockade of the enemy in the Black Sea region (its strategic value can refer to the importance of Weihaiwei during the Sino-Japanese War), and historically, Russia built a strong coastal defense fortress and stationed heavy troops immediately after taking Sevastopol.
In addition, the southern region of Crimea belongs to the first zone of climate, the climate is pleasant, as early as the Soviet period was a holy place for recuperation and tourism.
The northern region is mostly flat, and during the Soviet period it was used as an intensive agricultural area rich in grain, with the main crops being wheat, corn and sunflowers.
The Kerch Peninsula in the east is a low hilly area with abundant mineral resources, of which high-quality iron ore is the mainstay.
It can be said that the importance of the Crimean peninsula to Russia is self-evident, both military and economic, and historically the Crimean region was also part of Russian territoryThen why did it end up on the map of Ukraine?
The entire history of Russia can be said to be a history of Russian expansion in Eurasia.
In 1695, Tsar Peter I launched an expedition against the Ottoman Turks, but the expedition ended in failure due to the lack of strong support from the fleet.
Peter the Great, who had suffered this defeat, realized the importance of a strong navy for warfare, and in 1697 began to build a strong navy.
Peter himself even put down his body and disguised himself as an ordinary corporal to study in European countries with the delegation.
It was under Peter I that the "Black Sea Fleet" began to take shape.
Time came to 1762, the second Catherine II in history known as the "Great" became the **emperor, continuing the expansion policy of Peter the Great, during the reign of two Russian-Turkish wars, in 1783 the Crimea region was officially included in the territory, so Russia has the Black Sea region access to the sea and the initiative.
Since the Crimea region is so hard-won, then how did Russia "lose" her?
More than 100 years later, in 1928, the Soviet Union began to industrialize, the first five-year plan.
Unlike the primitive accumulation of capital in Western Europe after hundreds of years of the Age of Discovery and colonial expansion, the Soviet Union did not have the initial funds for industrialization, and had to sacrifice agriculture under the trade-off: through the purchase of agricultural products at a uniform low price and the sale of industrial products, the funds needed for industrialization were obtained (in economics, it is generally called the "scissors difference" between agriculture and industry).
In this process, in order to facilitate the management and allocation of agricultural resources, the agricultural collectivization movement was carried out at the same time as the First Five-Year Plan, and the Soviet Union began to unify the peasants into collective farms.
This measure did raise considerable funds for industrialization, but the suppression of agricultural products ** also invisibly suppressed the enthusiasm of agricultural production, and by the end of the First Five-Year Plan of the Soviet Union in 1932, the problem of reduced grain production and famine began to appear in agricultural areas throughout the country to varying degrees.
The worst of these is Ukraine, the most important food-producing region in the former Soviet Union, which was the hardest hit by the famine.
According to data from the Western researcher Robert Conquest in his book, between 1932 and 1933, the number of people who died of famine in Ukraine was conservatively estimated at about 5 million.
Why is the issue of the Holodomor in Ukraine mentioned here?
Because all the top leaders of the CPSU are well aware of the sacrifices made by the Ukrainian people on the road of industrialization of the Soviet Union, especially Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, who was the deputy head of the Organization Department of the Republic of Ukraine and the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine, who has the deepest feelings for Ukraine.
Although Khrushchev was Russian, he spent most of his political career in Ukraine, so he also regarded Ukraine as his second home in his heart.
In 1954, Khrushchev, then the first secretary of the CPSU, and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR led by him, adopted a resolution at a meeting to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's alliance with Russia:
"It was decided to assign the Crimean peninsula to the Ukrainian SSR. ”
In this way, the Crimean Peninsula, which was painstakingly acquired in history, was "confused" to Ukraine.
But at that time, this matter did not arouse many objections, and when it came to the matter led by the first secretary of the CPSU, not many people would have any objections;Second, Ukraine and Russia are both republics of the Soviet Union, and they are both one family, so they don't talk about the two families, anyway, yours and mine are the same, so this matter is over.
On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union was declared to be dissolved, ** into 15 countries, and Russia became the only successor state of the former Soviet Union.
However, at this time, the Crimea issue has become a bad account between Russia and Ukraine.
Originally, when the family was a family, the eldest brother and the second brother took the same land, but now that the family has been separated, this account has to be recalculated.
After the collapse of the USSR, part of Russia was justified by the fact that "Crimea has been an integral part of the territory of Russia since ancient times."(There is a saying that ** did shed a lot of blood for the Crimea region back then, but it is indeed an exaggeration to say that it has been since ancient times)., demanding that Ukraine return the Crimean region.
And the Ukrainian side is not to be outdone, and the top leader of the Soviet Union at the meeting that year personally assigned the Crimea region to Ukraine, which was clearly written in black and white
However, facts have proved that disputes between countries are often about who has the biggest fist and who is easy to speak.
Since Russia has inherited the vast majority of the maritime forces of the former Soviet Black Sea Fleet, and the Russian side has always insisted that the Russian Navy be stationed alone in the city of Sevastopol in Crimea, the actual control of the port of Sevastopol has always been in the hands of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Thus, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine simultaneously declared their own ownership of the Crimea region, which was nominally owned by Ukraine internationally until the 2014 referendum, but most of the actual control was in Russian hands.
It stands to reason that since Russia controls the port of Sevastopol and has de facto control over the Crimea region, why would it want the local people to hold an independence referendum and annex Crimea?
The fundamental reasons for this are economic and political considerations, and of course, military considerations.
At the root of the matter, the direct cause of Russia's annexation of Crimea was NATO's eastward expansion.
As everyone knows, NATO's initial purpose was to contain the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union and maintain its dominant position in Europe.
From its establishment in 1949 to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO carried out three expansions in 1952, 1955 and 1982, among which in 1955, the Soviet Union, which was pressed step by step, could only take the lead in establishing the "Warsaw Pact" in response to NATO's expansion.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO membership had expanded from 12 to 16 countries.
Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, there should be no need for the military organization to guard against the Soviet Union, after all, the huge amount of military spending every year is also a large amount of expenditure, but the strange thing is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the pace of NATO's eastward expansion has not stopped, but has accelerated more and more.
Its NATO has carried out five eastward expansions in 1999, 2004, 2009, 2017 and 2020, and as of September 30, 2022, Ukraine signed the application to join NATO, and there are currently a total of 30 NATO member states (excluding Ukraine).
In 1999, NATO's first eastward expansion after the collapse of the Soviet Union only agreed to the application of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to join.
However, Russia's concession did not win the goodwill of Western European countries, but only intensified the momentum of NATO's eastward expansion.
Only five years later, in 2004, NATO expanded eastward again, agreeing to the accession of seven countries at one time, and Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were all former Soviet republics.
This time, Russia did not swallow its anger and directly deployed missiles with nuclear warheads in the Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad, which can be regarded as a warning to NATO.
In 2009, another five years, NATO expanded eastward for the sixth time, admitting Albania and Croatia as members, absorbing the lessons of the previous time, and not agreeing to the accession of the former Soviet republics. It can be said that every eastward expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union is a frantic test of Russia's bottom line.
In the early days of Putin's coming to power, he continued Yeltsin's pro-Western political line, but after repeated betrayals and hostility, Putin realized that Russia could never be accepted as a member of the West, and the hostile attitude of Western countries towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War was inherited by Russia.
Gradually, Russia lost its friendship with the West and turned to China to carry out a series of political and economic cooperation. The relationship with Western countries has changed from being close to each other to being a simple import and export link.
Therefore, since Russia's complete turn of the first degree, it has always adopted a vigilant attitude towards NATO's eastward expansion, and Russia cannot sit idly by and ignore NATO's behavior of testing the bottom line again and again, especially when its strategic buffer zone with NATO countries is gradually shrinking, rather than sitting and waiting, it is better to gain the initiative for itself before completely falling into passivity.
Considering the extremely important strategic position of the Crimea region as early as the time of Tsarist Russia, the current back-and-forth between Ukraine and Ukraine over this is not a long-term solution after all.
If the pace of NATO's eastward expansion continues to increase, it will inevitably point fingers at the Crimea issue of Russia and Ukraine, you must know that Western countries in the world have been firmly controlling the right to speak, and at that time the Crimea issue may really be cooked rice, and once Russia's loss of the Crimea region becomes an established fact, it means that Russia will completely lose the strategic initiative in the Black Sea region.
Taking advantage of the fact that the current de facto control of Crimea is in its own hands, Russia held a referendum on March 16, 2014, which ended with more than 95% of the people supporting joining Russia (the West does not recognize the referendum results, but in fact the vast majority of the people in Crimea are pro-Russian).
Russia's move can be said to be clean and neat, which greatly shocked the international community.
Previously, the international community mostly maintained a neutral wait-and-see attitude towards the Crimea issue between Russia and Ukraine, and as soon as Russia's move came out, Western countries led by the United States began to vigorously advocate Russia's ambitions for outward expansion and strongly condemn it.
On March 20, 2014, the United States launched sanctions against Russia, and Obama, then the United States, said in his speech on the same day:
"Sanctions should be imposed not only on individual Russians, but also on key sectors of the Russian economy, which will hit the Russian economy hard and disrupt the global economy, but Russia must understand that further escalation will only lead to further isolation in the international community. ”As we all know, natural resources account for the majority of Russia's exports, and energy products account for the largest proportion of them.
In the early 80s of the 20 th century, a large part of the reason why the Cold War saw a wonderful reversal of "the Soviet Union attacking the United States and defending the United States" was that the Soviet Union caught up with the oil crisis and made a lot of foreign exchange by exporting oil.
After the outbreak of the Crimea incident, the United States and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries "OPEC" (OPEC) suppressed the international world, and this knife was firmly cut at the main artery of Russia's economy.
Along with the economic and trade sanctions, there are also technical sanctions, because the United States and its allies control the vast majority of the world's high-tech industries, and restrict the export of high-tech products to Russia through export controls.
Under the two-pronged and continuous sanctions, Russia's domestic prices are extremely unstable, Russia's imports of daily necessities have become more and more dependent on China, and Western sanctions have pushed Russia closer to China.
But apart from the ongoing sanctions imposed by Western countries, what benefits did Russia get after the annexation of Crimea?
First of all, regardless of whether Western countries admit it or not, Russia has actually incorporated the Crimea region into its territory in the form of a legal document, and together with it, it has not only obtained Crimea's natural resources, but also secured the strategic initiative in the Black Sea region (although it was said that it was actually controlled before, but after all, it was not sitting firmly enough).
And before that, Russia's right to use the port of Sevastopol was not forcibly occupied, but in exchange for the extremely cheap gas exported to Ukraine every year through large quantities, and now that Crimea is back in its own hands, this gas can be used for export at a normal price.
This alone could save Russia about $4 billion a year, which is enough for Russia to build a Crimean bridge every year.
At the beginning, we said that the reason for the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the impact of the Crimea incident in 2014 cannot be underestimated, it was Russia's annexation of Crimea, which directly led to the rapid deterioration of Russian-Ukrainian relations, and Ukraine, which was originally vacillating between NATO and Russia, was directly pushed to NATO.
It is precisely because Ukraine and NATO are getting closer and closer that it directly led to the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Therefore, Russia has repeatedly emphasized the "demilitarization" of Ukraine in its pursuit of the outcome of the war, because Russia does not want to have a direct border with NATO members.
The theme of today's world is peace and development, and the developed Western countries led by the United States are unwilling to see the steady development of developing countries in line with the outdated thinking of "zero-sum game", so they obstruct their development process through various means, and the consequences of NATO's eastward expansion have been clear to the United States from the very beginning, and the current Russia-Ukraine war with no end in sight is exactly what the United States wants to see.
It can be said that the sinister intentions of the United States are well known to the world, but in the face of the current general trend of "a community with a shared future for mankind", going against the grain is tantamount to turning back the wheel of history
Let's wait and see.