The full Video is now up on our Locals Channel; Truckers Roost.
Our intrepid reporter, Mr. Fat Flabbie Doobie, reports on the war between Russia and Ukraine in the former Crimean Khanate:
By around 800 a.d. the Kievan Rus was the dominant force in Rus culture, but the Crimea, and all coastal areas, were dominated by nomadic Turkic peoples, with ancient Greek port settlements scattered along the coast. In 1222 Ghengis Khan invaded the Crimea and defeated the Turks there. In the years that followed, his Golden Horde would conquer the entirety of the Crimea and the Kievan Rus. In 1441, the descendants of Ghengis Khan established a new nation, the Krimean Khanate, encompassing the Crimean peninsula and the Donbas region. In the meantime the center of Rus culture had shifted to Moscow and had slowly pushed the Mongols out of the greater Rus. In 1783, Catherine the great finally defeated the Khanate (ruled by Khans of Ghengis' Giray clan) and annexed it into Russia. For the next 134 years Russia endeavored to ethnically cleanse the old Khanate.
Near the end of the first world war, during the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Crimeans saw an opportunity and reinstated the Khanate as an Islamic Republic, which was short lived as it was trampled underfoot of the war between Russia and the Ukrainians (fighting under the banner of the Imperial German Army). The peace accords established the country of Ukraine, as the Ukrainian Soviet and granted the upland areas of the Khanate to her, while Russia retained the peninsula, until it, too, was turned over to the Ukrainian Soviet, by Khrushchev, in 1954. Ukraine took up the mantle of ethnically cleansing the Islamic Republican Khanate.
In 2014, in what has come to be called, either the "Maidan Revolution" or the U.S. backed "Maidan Coup", Pro Russian factions of the Ukrainian government were pushed out and replaced by pro western factions. In the Crimea, the people once again saw an opportunity to establish their own independence and seceded from Ukraine. The bloody civil war that followed, pitted the Crimeans against Ukrainian militias. Ethnically cleansing a region often results in the rise of fascist elements in the dominant society (see Zionism in Palestine or "Conservatism" in the American Southwest) and many of these Ukrainian militias were, in fact, fascists and even neo-Nazis.
In a standard Cold War proxy war template, the U.S. backed the Ukrainian militias while Russia backed the Crimeans (annexing the peninsula in 2014), until the Ukrainian militias began a Gaza style indiscriminate bombing and shelling campaign against the entire civilian population, prompting Russia to invade in force in February of 2022.
In the initial phase of combat, Russia took all of the former Khanate and positioned an invasion force outside of Kiev, which was withdrawn in order to entice Ukraine to the negotiating table. The negotiations were cancelled by the U.K. Prime Minister, Ukrainian Armed forces retook Kharkiv and the US and NATO began arming the Ukrainians in earnest, raising a large number of NATO trained and equipped brigades, and pushing them to launch a disastrous "counter-offensive". As the counter-offensive petered out and Russia began it's own renewed offensive, the war in Gaza Palestine broke out leading the US and NATO to reprioritize the Crimean war.
