re: US Tells Russia That NATO May Continue Expansion East, Russia Says It May Use Force

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Crimea had been part of Russia for centuries

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And the Ukraine also has been its own country, at least in name, for a century. For that entire century, Crimea was a part of the Ukraine.

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Now, we can argue that the referendum vote was a joke but given the demographics of the electorate it isn’t shocking that the vote would produce such a result.

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If Russia has to send armed soldiers in order to conduct the vote, there's a pretty good chance that the results of said vote would not have been the same without said armed soldiers.

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Moreover, given our own elections here in the US and our support for secession acts in numerous places such as East Timor, South Sudan, Kosovo, etc, etc, we would look quite hypocritical in opposing it.

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Most of those were secession movements where the residents of those spaces requested autonomy from the larger country to which they were a part. None were requesting to secede from one country just to join a larger neighbor to which their original country was geopolitically opposed.

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Regardless, I wouldn’t send Americans to die over Crimea.

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Same. Sucks for The Ukraine, though. The Ukrainian civil war (which has essentially been a proxy war between East and West) has resulted in a massive migration of Ukrainians West to Britain. The Ukrainization of rural English towns was a major factor in Brexit, as once the Ukrainians reached fellow Schengen area nation Hungary, there was nothing Great Britain could do to repel the migrants. Ukrainian migrants were driving wage deflation and taking up service industry jobs, basically becoming the Mexicans of the UK for lack of a better analogy.