Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Tuesday (18 March) signed a treaty annexing the Ukrainian region of Crimea, shortly before the Russia-Ukraine confrontation claimed its first casualty.
He justified the step in a long speech to MPs which described the Black Sea peninsula - given by the USSR to Ukraine in 1954 - as quintessentially Russian in cultural and historical terms.
He said Ukraine is now run by “neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and Russophobes.”
He also framed the crisis in a...
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