Word: crimeans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk tried to slow the movement, warning that "there can be no guarantee that events in the Crimea will not lurch out of control and that human blood will not be spilled." But the Crimean parliament ignored him and last month passed a resolution calling for a referendum on independence. The response from Kiev was swift: the Ukrainian parliament declared the Crimean resolution unconstitutional, and government officials hinted that the Crimean legislature might be dissolved and direct rule from Kiev imposed...
Under pressure, Crimean leaders backed down and rescinded the resolution, & but not before Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, the Kremlin's standard-bearer for increasingly influential Russian nationalists, blasted Ukrainian politicians for portraying Russia as "an insidious empire" and trying to break up the Commonwealth. "The referendum in Crimea must be held, and no one can ban it with force or with threats," Rutskoi insisted in a newspaper article. Two days later, in a closed-door session, the Russian parliament upped the ante by voting to annul the 1954 transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine as "an illegal...
...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...