Russians deploy S-400 missile batteries to reinforce defenses in Crimea region

EuroNews reported that the Russian military forces have deployed a new unit with S-400 Anti-Ballistic missile batteries in Crimea.  These arrived on January 13th, when Moscow deployed this new division outside Sevastopol, where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based.

Naturally the West is not happy about this.  While there is no present threat in the area, the capability of these weapons is considerable, since they are able to detect incoming missiles from about 600 kilometers (373 miles) away. The system is able to stop incoming ballistic missiles out to a distance of 60 km (37 miles).

This is the second S-400 division deployed to Crimea since Russia annexed the region by local referendum.

The Russian Federation’s referendum and annexation of Crimea has been a thorn in the side of the West ever since it took place almost four years ago, in March 2014. The notion that any nation of thinking people could possibly want to become part of the evil, Putin-led Russian Federation was preposterous to the enlightened West, who was striving to make Ukraine free of their evil Russian overlords.

Except that this was not really the truth. The Crimean people voted to join Russia in droves, at a rate of not less than 95% of the votes, and no lower than 83% turnout.  To Western eyes, this enormously lopsided result seems to be impossible, since it does not happen in US elections. Owing to the less than credible history of voting during the Soviet era, the West easily points an accusatory finger at Russia and Putin and says that this is just the re-emergence of the Soviet power, and that Putin is a thug.

But again, this is not really the truth.

The Ukraine is a matter that is of enormous complexity and even greater blurring of real facts on the ground.  There certainly are people in Ukraine, Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea that provide on-scene reports, but it is easy to overlook this material because it is blocked from widespread dissemination. It is then possible to turn on the reporters and call them stooges of Putin, or some other epithet, rather than choosing the path of intellectual honesty by viewing these reports and analyzing them.

However, these are pretty impromptu interviews (turn Closed Captioning on if you do not understand Russian) that illustrate what people on the ground really think:

At any rate, the people in Crimea seem generally content to be part of Russia.  Maybe the West ought to listen to what the people want, instead of telling them what they should want. Ukraine apparently was not taking care of things here too well, judging from the stories we hear in this video.