Word: crimean
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Patches of snow still glimmer on the craggy mountains above, but on the Black Sea coast of the Crimean peninsula summer has arrived. In Yalta the terraced stone walls of the old town are draped in purple wisteria and wild yellow roses, and the first wave of tourists has come to stroll among the palmettos, ! cypresses and golden rain trees lining the town's crooked streets. Though it was not far from Yalta that Mikhail Gorbachev spent three days under house arrest last August during the coup attempt, the resort is best remembered as the site where Churchill, Roosevelt...
...unimaginable has since come to pass, and now the Crimea is at the center of a bitter territorial row between Russia and Ukraine that threatens to destroy the fragile Commonwealth of Independent States and make enemies out of two nuclear-armed nations. In the Crimean capital of Simferopol, ethnic Russians gather daily outside the local parliament building to accuse Ukrainian leaders of disregard for their right to self-determination. In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, 400 miles away, thousands have converged in recent weeks to protest Moscow's "imperialist" designs on the Crimea, which is part of Ukraine...
...form. But when British Defense Secretary Tom King and his Russian counterpart, Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, finally popped into 10 Downing Street last month, their sheepish explanation took bosses John Major and Boris Yeltsin by surprise. Seems they'd been up till all hours sampling a precious case of 1939 Crimean champagne. Major exclaimed at the extravagance, but Yeltsin just seemed to feel left out. Said he: "Good God! I thought all of that vintage had been drunk by Khrushchev...
Those defeats were followed by two other stunning losses. On June 7 German forces supplemented by troops from Romania began a monthlong final offensive against the great Crimean port of Sevastopol, pounding it with Luftwaffe raids before sending infantry units to wage bloody street battles. By the beginning of July, the city collapsed. The fall of Rostov-on-Don, the so-called gateway to the Caucasus, was even more ominous. The siege was embarrassingly brief, and whole Soviet units reportedly fled in panic. Suddenly the way south to the oil fields of Baku was open. With German armies simultaneously dashing...
...signs of tension when she accompanied her husband to the London economic summit in July. Drawing aside Barbara Bush, Raisa confided her worries about Mikhail's political future, even hinting that she feared for his life. Soviet officials in Europe report that she became hysterical several times during her Crimean captivity, and speculate that she has suffered a stroke and a heart attack...