There are no easy answers to the annexation of Crimea, but I do think that the Western powers have involved themselves in a fight they won't win.  It suited many of them, on many different occasions, to hold referendums to allow people to determine their fate.  Now that the Crimeans held a referendum in their country, where the result was always a foregone conclusion, everybody slates it as being illegal and unconstitutional.  It looks worse once you have seen a 96% result by the Crimeans in favour of joining Russia.  The fact of the matter is that Crimea has a very complicated history and while Ukraine was part of the USSR, Crimea was given by Russia to the Ukraine.  It only happened approximately 50 years ago and so it is certainly not the case that Crimea has been a part of Ukraine, while Ukraine has been an independent country, for all eternity!  

Ukraine is a relatively new country, once it broke away from the USSR, and the vast majority of people that live in Crimea are in fact Russians.  I don’t feel particularly strongly about the issue because on the one hand we cannot have all people, living in different areas of the world, having votes all the time to decide which country they form a part of, but on the other hand the result is overwhelming and it would seem to make little sense to force the people to remain within the Ukraine if clearly they do not want to be – however valuable that land is of course to Ukraine.  On the other hand, I really don’t think that the issue is serious enough, given the history of Crimea as well as how the votes have gone, for the European powers as well as America who obviously have a cold war history with Russia, to start threatening sanctions, etc.  One has to see Ukraine in the proper perspective and that is that its whole yearly GDP is worth less than the Walt Disney company share on the New York Stock Exchange.  Nobody is getting murdered, there is not ethnic cleansing going on and all that has happened is that people living in an area, have decided that they want to form a part of the country that they always belonged to in the past in any event, namely Russia.

For the Western powers and the media to be meeting with the “government” of Ukraine is also ridiculous – Ukraine has a government and a President who, however unpopular, was overthrown and the current “government” have not been elected by anybody. They need to be elected before they can have any legitimacy.  On the other hand I do see the West's concern with Putin - who seems to develop more dictatorial tendencies every year he is in power.  They clearly want to send a message to him that they won't allow him to go any further - but I just don't see him backing down on Crimea, nor the West doing anything about it so my point is that this is probably not the fight to pick with him - but if the real reason is to stop him going further down the road and trying to annex another territory, that's another story.