The Crimea

 

The Crimea is a landmass extending from the Ukraine into the Black Sea. Odessa, Sevastopol, Yalta are some of its famous cities. The entire coast of the Black Sea was settled over 500 B.C. by the ubiquitous Greek traders. The area is filled with the names of famous peoples: Scythians, Sarmatians, the Goths from the north, Huns, Khazars, Turkic nomads and the Mongol-Taters of the Golden Horde.

 

The Perokop Isthmus is Crimea's narrow connection to mainland Ukraine, which supplies the peninsula with most of its electricity and water, as well as 70% of its food. This is a very tenuous geographical connection.

But Crimea has stronger connections to Russia. It was first conquered by Russia in the 17th century. The embarrassing Crimea War where Britain, France, and Sardinia sided with the Ottoman Turks against Russia, was fought from 1853 to 1856.

 

The Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea, founded in 1783 by Prince Potemkin, has enormous historical and political importance to Russia and was a European focus during the Crimea War.

The crew of the battleship Potemkin revolted off the Ukrainian coast in 1905 soon after the Navy's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and that revolt has been accepted as being the catalyst for the Russian Revolution, even by Lenin himself.

Opposition to the Germans and their Romanian allies along the Black Sea harbors was ferocious in the second war and the Russian population suffered fearfully.

 

The towns on the Black Sea have been vacation areas for wealthy Russians and the Romanov family had a villa there in Yalta, where the Big Three met at the end of WWII to carve up Europe. Its ports are bases for the Russian Navy. The Ukraine is the largest country in Europe with a lot of divided loyalties. Russian heritage and language dominates the Crimea especially. Stalin brought an anti-Tater and anti-Greek "cleansing" to the entire Ukraine during his rule.Crimea later became part of Ukraine in 1954 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, an ethnic Ukrainian, transferred it from Russia. 
In 1991, The Ukraine separated from Russia as Russia fell apart. But the Russians never gave up hope, especially Putin. They have always had a hand, a heavy hand, in local politics since. Viktor Yuschenko, the pro-Ukraine and anti-Russian leader has made a complete recovery from the unexplained "accidental" dioxin poisoning which occurred in late 2004 during a bitterly fought election campaign in which he defeated the pro-Russian Yanukovych, but they tried quite fearlessly.

The Crimea has some historic, military and emotional attachments to Russia, certainly, but it is vulnerable without the Ukraine which is its supply source.

However many think this map explains most of the Russian interest in Ukraine: (from Zerohedge)