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This week saw the 12th anniversary of Crimea’s historic reunification with Russia. Understanding the pivotal event explains the background to the ongoing NATO proxy war and why Russia was justified in taking protective action in 2022.

It also exposes the bankrupt Western narrative accusing Russia of aggression against Ukraine and the futile demands made by the Kiev regime and its European NATO sponsors in particular for the return of territory as a “condition” of peace.

The West’s obduracy over Crimea is due to denialism and falsification of history regarding the roots of the ongoing conflict. Hence, the inability or unwillingness of the current Western leaders to find a peaceful solution.

First of all, the Crimean Peninsula is incontestably a historic Russian land, as is the rest of Novorossiya: Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zoporozhye, which also joined the Russian Federation through popular referenda in 2022. These lands have much more right to be part of Russia than, say, California or Texas has to be part of the United States of America.

The Kiev regime’s demand for these territories to be returned to Ukraine is delusional and a distortion of history. The European Union, under its misguided Russophobic leadership, continues to insist on supporting Kiev’s specious and unattainable claims.

Unlike the previous Biden administration, the United States under Donald Trump seems to have become more practical in realpolitik and is urging the Kiev regime to accept Russia’s territorial claims in order to make a peace deal. The Kiev regime’s unrealistic and unjustified territorial demands of return – bolstered by the European Union – are a major reason why the conflict persists with thousands of casualties every week, mainly on the Ukrainian military side.

Ukraine’s borders, as recognized by the Western states, are a dubious, if not farcical, affair. These borders only came into existence by an accident of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Ukraine was never an independent or integral state. For most of its history, it existed as a region or borderland that was part of Russia, Poland, or the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. During the Soviet Union’s existence (1917-91), Ukraine was fashioned into a Soviet Republic as a constituent part of the USSR. Crimea was gifted to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954 in an arbitrary political calculation by Moscow to influence demographics. The decision had no historical or cultural merit. So when Ukraine declared “independence” in 1991, the inclusion of Crimea and other parts of Novorossiya was an artificial construct.

The targeting of Ukraine for a color revolution by the United States and its NATO partners from 2004 onwards led to grave internal tensions with the majority Russian-speaking regions. The Russian language and culture were banned while the memory of Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with Nazi Germany was glorified, even though those collaborators were complicit in the mass murder of compatriots. The culmination was the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014, when an elected pro-Russian government was overthrown in a violent seizure of power. The new regime in Kiev was dominated by far-right factions that venerated the legacy of anti-Russian nationalists. The current administration under the hopelessly corrupt Vladimir Zelensky and his cronies stems from the illegal coup in 2014.

The Western-backed regime from 2014 onwards was purposed to act as a catspaw against Russia for the geopolitical objective of destabilizing Russia. (Such a policy goes back to the CIA and MI6 covert recruitment of Ukrainian fascists immediately after World War Two). A major part of the strategy to destabilize Russia was the animosity and genocidal policies towards the Russian-speaking population in Novorossiya.

That is why the people of Crimea acted promptly in the days after the coup on February 22, 2014, to organize a referendum on March 16 and to defend their Russian heritage. With an overwhelming vote of 97 percent, Crimeans democratically mandated the unification of their land with the Russian Federation. They consider it a reunification. And they wanted nothing to do with the Russia-hating coup regime that the NATO powers had installed. The Western media continues to spin the 2014 coup d’état as a pro-European Union, pro-NATO democratic movement, referred to as “Euromaidan.” It was a violent assault involving false-flag sniper murders with a legacy of rampant corruption and repression that blights Ukraine to this day.

On the part of Crimea, it was a prescient move that gave the peninsula large-scale protection from the marauding forces of the NATO-backed Kiev regime.

In April 2014, the Kiev regime, weaponized by NATO and comprising NeoNazi battalions, began attacking the Russian-speaking regions of Lugansk and Donetsk. Bogus peace deals known as the Minsk Accords were cynically proffered by Western backers to give cover for an ongoing genocidal campaign that lasted until February 24, 2022, when Russian forces took matters into their hands by intervening to defend the self-declared republics of Novorossiya. Tragically, the conflict has continued for more than four years, but Russia has gained most of the historic territory. Moscow’s terms for an end to the conflict insist on retaining all of those territories. Returning them to Ukraine is out of the question.

The European governments and their controlled news media persist in a bankrupt propaganda narrative that portrays Ukraine as an independent state that was attacked by unprovoked Russian aggression. That is a risible inversion of reality.

The historic referendum of Crimea demonstrates how the West and its puppet regime in Kiev have concocted a false narrative to propagate the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. The European Union and its Kiev cabal are following a policy that is based on lies and distortions. That is why these parties are unable to come to a peaceful negotiated end to the war. They do not have solutions because they falsify the problem. The problem is that the Kiev regime was a creation of Western imperialist ideologues and militarists who used the Ukraine as a spearhead against Russia.

Crimea today celebrates its rightful place in the Russian nation. The peninsula still comes under sporadic attacks from air strikes by the NATO-backed NeoNazis in Kiev, who claim to be liberating the people of Crimea. But by and large, Crimea has been spared the fate of other people in Ukraine who are tormented by the NATO and European Union-backed fascists.

The people of Lugansk, Donetsk, and other parts of Novorossiya are also enjoying relative peace under the protection of the Russian Federation.

Congratulations to Crimea on making its historic decision 12 years ago. May peace be fully realized soon for the peninsula and the rest of Novorossiya.

Addressing the cause of conflict, honestly and objectively, is the only way to establish peace.