this would be on the masthead:

News Is What Somebody Does Not Want You To Print. All the Rest Is Public Relations.

It was a Russian possession for centuries until some idiot head of the Politburo reassigned it (arbitrarily) to Ukraine without asking the Crimeans what they wanted.

They got a chance to vote their choice recently, and it went overwhelmingly for reunion with Russia. Naturally this was distorted in the US Corporate Media into an "annexation" because Russia Always Evil.

"War crimes" in Syria is the soot-stained pot calling the kettle dirty. Both/all sides are guilty.

It also wasn't Putin/Russia who started a war in Ukraine - it was a coup d'etat, backed and sponsored by the US CIA, that got totally out of hand.

Putin is no innocent, but he's not King Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster from Outer Space, either.

and as ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse as Russia from the utter decimation of the country caused by application of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine during the early US puppet Yeltsin's leadership?

Rising living standards

In 2005, Putin launched National Priority Projects in the fields of health care, education, housing and agriculture. In his May 2006 annual speech, Putin proposed increasing maternity benefits and prenatal care for women. Putin was strident about the need to reform the judiciary considering the present federal judiciary "Sovietesque", wherein many of the judges hand down the same verdicts as they would under the old Soviet judiciary structure, and preferring instead a judiciary that interpreted and implemented the code to the current situation. In 2005, responsibility for federal prisons was transferred from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Ministry of Justice.

The most high-profile change within the national priority project frameworks was probably the 2006 across-the-board increase in wages in healthcare and education, as well as the decision to modernise equipment in both sectors in 2006 and 2007.[57]

During Putin's government, poverty was cut more than half[17][18] and real GDP has grown rapidly.[19]

Restoring functionality of government

The concept of "Putinism" was described in a positive sense by Russian political scientist Andranik Migranyan.[25] According to Migranyan, Putin came into office when the worst regime was established: the economy was "totally decentralized", and "the state had lost central authority, while the oligarchs robbed the country and controlled its power institutions." In two years, Putin has restored hierarchy of power, ending the omnipotence of regional elites as well as destroying political influence of "oligarchs and oligopolies in the federal center." Boris Yeltsin-era non-institutional center of power commonly called "The Family". was ruined, which, according to Migranyan, in turn undercut the positions of the actors, such as Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, who had sought to privatize the Russian state "with all of its resources and institutions".[25]

The real reason that the leaders of the Washington Consensus (neoliberal) Nations do not like Putin is because he has pulled Russia out from the rubble of the defunct USSR and has made the country proud and strong again.

BTW, what western leader has ever matched Putin's popularity for as long and consistently as has Putin? This must piss them off to no end as no amount of western propaganda has been able to affect this popularity.

This has irked the neocons who still infest the current US administration to no end.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine: (I am giving the original writing as it is more honest to the real spirit of the doctrine)

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.

The U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

I'm not going to bother with the rest of your........

The reality in Crimea is completely at odds with the Western narrative. The facts on the ground are just that .. facts.
- Crimea was a special part of Russia, is now part of Russia and will always be part of Russia. It's what the people of Crimea want.
- The alternative is to allow the Bandera Nazis to persecute, kill and drive them off of their land. A group of Crimeans demonstrated at Maidan pro government. A group of Nazis followed their bus back to Crimea, intercepted it and beat them with iron pipes.
- President Putin is telling the separatists in Eastern Ukraine that they cannot have their desire for separation or unification with Russia. They must follow the Minsk II agreement. All that Kiev needs to do is to implement the agreement and the Ukraine becomes whole. Yet the neoNazis in Kiev refuse to do this, preferring to pound Eastern Urkaine with mortar and artillery with the hope of killing them all and driving them off of their land.
- Clearly the West is the trouble maker in all of this. Ukraine was a democratic state balancing the various factions and resolving the differences at the ballot box. Once again, the US interfered and replaced stability with dead people and scattered body limbs and permanent chaos. When will we ever stop?

What kind of question is that? Of course they failed me, that's their job.

calling a friend - or an ambulance - to take you to an ER? I'm only here tonight because I called every number in my address book, eventually connecting with a friend of a friend (whom I'd never met before); she came to my house, assessed the situation, and called the ambulance for me. Saved my life. Maybe for me to be here tonight to encourage you to call an ambulance - now. Please, for a wascally wabbit 'way down South?