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Crimea. Where to next for the Russians?

The take-over - or however it is be characterised - of Crimea by the Russians seems to have been wrapped up today.    Leaving aside the strident voices in the USA and Europe calling for action against Russia (whatever that is supposed to be is never spelt out) what does incorporation of Crimea as part of Russian mean? - and what are its implications?

Hugh White is professor of strategic studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU.   He writes in The Age on events in Crimea and what it means for the Russians and Europe.

"Russia's use of force to compel Crimea's defection from Ukraine behind the fig leaf of last weekend's referendum marks a new phase in the history of Europe.

President Vladimir Putin has defied the principles of international order on which post-Cold-War Europe was supposed to be built, and forced the Europeans to think seriously about their own security for the first time in 25 years.

This seems to have come as a surprise to most Europeans, but it shouldn't have. Putin has simply taken the first step to reclaim the lands that Russia lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. He once called that ''a great geopolitical tragedy'', and he is not alone. Even Russians who cheered the end of Soviet regime nonetheless deeply resented the loss of immense territories that had been part of the old Russian Empire for centuries before the communists took power. They have never really accepted that loss, and it has always been likely that sooner or later Moscow would try to reverse the redrawing of Russia's western borders in 1991.

The urge to do this has perhaps become all the stronger because Russia has achieved so little else in the decades since the communists fell. Reclaiming old glories seems all the more important to a country that can claim so few new ones. And because it has achieved so little, post-Soviet Russia has no means to win its old lands back except with the still-formidable remnants of the Soviet era's only real legacy to Russia - its military strength."

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