Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Tuesday (18 March) signed a treaty annexing the Ukrainian region of Crimea, shortly before the Russia-Ukraine confrontation claimed its first casualty.
He justified the step in a long speech to MPs which described the Black Sea peninsula - given by the USSR to Ukraine in 1954 - as quintessentially Russian in cultural and historical terms.
He said Ukraine is now run by “neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and Russophobes.”
He also framed the crisis in a...
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Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.