Ukraine: Ukraine and Black Sea Fleet Essay

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Sebastian Garcia!
March 7th, 2014!
Current Events: A!

1. History of Ukraine!
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Ukraine was also known as “Kievan Rus” until the 16th century. In the 9th century, Kiev was the major political and cultural center in eastern Europe. Kievan Rus reached the height of its power in the 10th century and adopted Byzantine Christianity. The Mongol conquest in 1240 ended Kievan power. From the 13th to the 16th century, Kiev was under the influence of Poland and western Europe. After the Russian Revolution, Ukraine declared its independence from
Russia on Jan. 28, 1918, and several years of warfare ensued with several groups. The Red
Army finally was victorious over Kiev, and in 1920 Ukraine became a Soviet republic. In 1922,
Ukraine became one of the founders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the 1930s, the Soviet government's enforcement of collectivization met with peasant resistance, which in turn prompted the confiscation of grain from Ukrainian farmers by Soviet authorities; the resulting famine took an estimated 5 million lives. Ukraine was one of the most devastated
Soviet republics after World War II.!

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2. Crimean History!
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Crimea is a peninsula located on the northern coast of the Black Sea and a Russianspeaking republic of Ukraine. In its early history, it was colonized and occupied repeatedly - by the Greeks, Romans, Huns, the Byzantine Empire, among others. In the 13th century, Crimea was occupied by the Tatars - Turkic-speaking Muslims who were part of the Golden Horde, a branch of the Mongol Empire established by a grandson of Genghis Khan. The Crimean
Khanate became a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, but also a power in its own right, claiming territory in what is today Russia's Caspian-Volga region. Crimea was conquered by the Russian Empire in 1783. The Crimean War of 1853-56, which pitted Russia against an alliance of Great Britain, France, Sardinia and Turkey, was fought mainly on the peninsula. The allied forces took the city of Sevastopol, the home of the Tsar’s Black Sea Fleet, after a long siege, and by the war’s end, the Crimea lay in ruins. During the civil war that broke out in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Crimea was the scene of brutal fighting between Tsarist, Bolshevik and anarchist forces. Following the Bolshevik victory, Crimea was made part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In 1944, Soviet dictator
Josef Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia and other parts of the
Soviet Union for their alleged collaboration with the Nazis. In 1954, the Soviet Union, now under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Crimea became part of independent
Ukraine, and Moscow and Kyiv agreed to divide up the former Soviet Black Sea Fleet. Crimea's port city of Sevastopol remains the base for Russia's Black Sea Fleet. Ethnic Russians account for 58 percent of Crimea's population, while Ukrainians make up 24 percent. Crimean Tatars, who began returning to the peninsula from exile after the fall of the Soviet Union, comprise 12 percent of its population. In a recent poll of Russians by the state-run All-Russia

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