This week's Crimean crisis is more than a storm in a teacup, but it won't threaten world peace. In a tense and diplomatically fascinating week, Russian, US and EU statements have so far been carefully measured to stay well short of any danger zone, and Putin's de facto re-incorporation of Crimea back into Russia is now pretty much complete. The new Ukrainian government and its Western supporters will huff and puff, but they can forget about Crimea: it is Russian again now.
The mountainous Crimean peninsula is virtually an island in the Black Sea. It is joined to the mainland by a narrow swampy neck of land. It is about half the size of Tasmania with a population of around 2 million mostly living in several large coastal cities and resort towns. Its warm climate and beautiful scenery attracted many Russians to visit and live during the 19th century. Crimea ('Krim') became Russia's Riviera. Its original Tartar population is now a 12 per cent minority. Ethnic Russians are 58 per cent and ethnic Ukrainians 24 per cent. The local language is Russian.
Crimea, originally part of the declining Turkish Empire, was annexed by expansionist Tsarist Russia in 1783. It has been of huge military significance to Russia ever since.
The ice-free port of Sevastopol soon became Russia's main naval base and strategic window into the Mediterranean. Britain's disastrous attack on Russia in 1854 was through Crimea. The White Russian forces' final capitulation to the Red Army in the Civil War was in Crimea. It was the scene of bitter fighting in WW2. Armed resistance continued in the Crimean mountains throughout that war. Yalta was the site of Stalin's dacha, and the crucial 1945 conference that decided the boundaries of postwar Europe.
In 1954, at a time when Ukraine was firmly part of the seemingly permanent Soviet Union, Khrushchev rashly redrew Soviet internal boundaries to make Crimea part of Ukraine. When the SU broke up and Ukraine became independent, a special status was negotiated for Crimea as an autonomous republic within Ukraine, with special protections for its Russian majority and unimpeded shared occupancy of the naval base: an uneasy compromise that lasted as long as pro-Russian governments ruled in the Ukraine.
Now, with the forced removal of pro-Russian President Yanukovich in Kiev in what Moscow has condemned as an illegal coup, and with anti-Russian elements now in the ascendant in Kiev, Putin moved quickly to reassert