#coast of Crimea

[expressions-of-nature]

Sevastopol, Crimea by Ekaterina Dmitrenko

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

20th August 1980: Yalta, Crimea, Ukraine.

[illustratus]

A Moonlit Night on the Crimean Coast by Ivan Aivazovsky

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Sickness gripped China's east coast in 1345, and the next year a Mongol army brought the plague to Caffa in Crimea,* the very city from which Marco Polo's uncles had departed for Beijing nearly a century before.

*The chronicler Gabriele de' Mussi (who was in Italy at the time) insisted that the Mongols used catapults to hurl plague-ridden corpses into Caffa. Most historians suspect – more prosaically – that rats carried plague-bearing fleas from the besiegers' camp into the city.

"Why the West Rules – For Now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future" - Ian Morris

[wilwheaton]

Elon Musk’s company SpaceX is a U.S. defense contractor, with billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts. That makes his intervention to thwart Ukrainian military operations a U.S. national security concern, not only because America supports Ukraine’s self-defense against Russia’s invasion, but also because it suggests the U.S. military may have left itself open to similar disruptions. Excerpts from biographer Walter Isaacson’s book, Elon Musk, show Musk denying Ukraine Starlink internet access off the coast of Crimea in Sept. 2022, causing Ukrainian sea drones to stop functioning. A private citizen thwarting an in-progress military operation like this is unprecedented. [...] Congress should exercise its oversight powers and look into both SpaceX’s actions in Ukraine and the extent of American dependence on Musk’s company. At minimum, it’s an information security risk. Isaacson says Musk texted him about the Ukrainian sea drones headed to Crimea as he was trying to decide what to do. No one should be telling journalists about secret military operations as they’re happening. Elon Musk especially shouldn’t be in position to, given his direct contact with foreign officials, and his apparent affinity for online trolls, including contributors to Russian state media outlet RT. He’s free to associate with whomever he wants, and to express his opinions about the war (even if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and has vast means to spread his thoughts widely). But a defense contractor controlled by one volatile personality, who is at best ignorant of international power politics and susceptible to Russian propaganda, and does not respect that national security decisions are up to governments rather than him personally, is not someone the United States should consider a reliable business partner.

U.S. Government Can’t Allow Elon Musk the Power to Intervene in Wars

[ivan-aivazovsky-paintings]

-Sailing off the coast of the Crimea in the moonlit night-

[sovietpostcards]

A tent tourist camp on the Black Sea coast. Yevpatoria, Crimea (1979).

[dontforgetukraine]

Partenit. Southern coast of Crimea. 1910s. by Serhii Vasylkivskyi (1854–1917).

[xhxhxhx]

I'm trying to write these earlier in the day.

I used to put off writing until I finished the smaller, more tractable tasks I set for myself. But by the time I finished the little things, I had no energy for writing.

Now, though, I find I don't have the energy for the little things if I start writing too late in the day. If I start writing late enough, I don't have the energy to exercise.

It's 10:15 a.m. Let's see if I can't finish this with energy to spare.

I.

I write to you from San Francisco, a small town on the Pacific Coast of California, servicing a patchwork of commuter suburbs around what we call the "San Francisco Bay Area."

Back in the 1950s, they called the City "Baghdad by the Bay," after its profound ethnic and religious divides, low-intensity urban warfare, and decrepit public infrastructure.

It's awful. Even here in the Green Zone.

II.

Americans like to say that San Francisco has a "Mediterranean" climate. And it's true that it has a Köppen climate classification of Csb, which we call a "warm-summer Mediterranean climate."

Köppen is a three-tier classification scheme. It designates climates by three-letter labels, with each letter dividing the world into finer and finer categories.

The first Köppen letter divides the world into five parts, each designated by the first five letters of the alphabet: tropical A; arid B; temperate C; cold D; and polar E.

Four of the five letters separate the world into mutually-exclusive categories by mean temperatures in the hottest and coldest months, making for a neat algorithm.

If it's above 10ºC in the coldest month, it's tropical A, else:

If it's above 0ºC in the coldest month, it's temperate C, else:

If it's above 10ºC in the hottest month, it's cold D, else:

If it's below 10ºC in the hottest month, it's polar E.

Arid B is an irregularity. It's based on a precipitation threshold, not mean monthly temperatures. It's also hard to characterize in a single phrase, since it varies with the seasonality of the precipitation. It's higher if the precipitation comes in warm months.

But never mind that. It's not arid in San Francisco. That's part of the problem.

In San Francisco's Csb, C stands for temperate, s for dry summer, and b for warm summer.

Temperate means it averages above 10ºC in the hottest month and between 0ºC and 18ºC in its coldest; dry summer means it gets less than 40 mm of precipitation in its driest month; and warm summer means it averages below 22ºC in the hottest month, but above 10ºC for more than four months each year.

Now, is that Mediterranean? It's not obvious to me that it is. Let's go to the map.

III.

Here's beautiful California, in all its climatic variation, courtesy of our friends at the Köppen-Geiger Explorer:

Let's start in the Los Angeles basin, along the borderlands between the yellow and sienna towards the bottom of the map.

Los Angeles divides into three primary climate regions, which provide a useful key to the California experience.

The coast of western Los Angeles, from Santa Monica down to Palos Verdes, and continuing along the coast of Orange County to the south, is a cold, semi-arid steppe, or Bsk.

It's a climate it shares with Colorado Springs, the Texas panhandle, and a swathe of the Eurasian steppe lands, from Crimea to Volgograd to Inner Mongolia.

South and central Los Angeles, south of the 10, but extending northeast to a frontier in Culver City, Mid-Wilshire, and Koreatown, and south through Anaheim and Garden Grove to Irvine, is a hot, semi-arid steppe, or Bsh.

It's a climate it shares with Gaza, the West Bank of the Jordan, Mosul, the Zagros foothills of Khuzestan, Amritsar, and the northern, or Turkish, part of Cyprus.

North of that, extending from downtown across the mountains into the San Fernando Valley, and east across the river to El Monte, Pomona, and Rancho Cucamonga, is the last part of Los Angeles, the hot-summer Mediterranean, or Csa.

This climate, the climate of Glendale and Pasadena, of Burbank and Sherman Oaks, of Van Nuys, Encino, and Calabasas, is what I think of as the actual Mediterranean climate.

Because it's the climate of the actual Mediterranean.

It's a climate it shares with Athens and Rome, Syracuse and Tunis, Jerusalem and Jaffa, Florence and Naples, but not, significantly, a climate it shares with San Francisco.

Because it's too warm for the city by the Bay.

IV.

Now let's look north, to the Golden Gate.

Here you can see that the Bay Area is, as you might have guessed, a homogeneous and indistinct stain on the map of California.

Does it have semiarid steppe lands? No. Does it have hot summers? No. From the South Bay to the Valley, from the West Side to the East Side, everyone has the same climate, and nobody's very happy.

San Francisco shares a climate with Oakland which shares a climate with Mountain View which shares a climate with Sausalito which shares a climate with San Jose which shares a climate with Berkeley and Richmond. It's a climate that stretches, like an open sore, down to Santa Cruz and Monterey.

It's all the same fucking climate.

It's called, as you may recall, the warm-summer Mediterranean climate, or Csb. Not hot summer. Not the summer of Glendale or Pasadena. No. A warm summer.

How warm is a warm summer? Is that a Mediterranean kind of summer? Is that the kind of summer you get in the south of France or the Greek islands? Well, no.

You know who else has a warm summer?

Fucking Galicia, that's who. The Parnassus Mountains. Mount fucking Lebanon.

You know who else has this fucking climate?

The Pacific fucking Northwest. Because it's cold and wet there. Just like San Francisco.

VI.

San Francisco: It's cold and damp!

I fucking hate it.

[arkhyp-kuindzhi-paintings]

-Sea coast, Crimea-

[nuno-draws]

Prompts used: • Respecting indigenous peoples • Clothing and accessories • History  @yourcubitoyourculture

Presenting Pearlescentmoon in Crimean Tatar national costume and with their flag!

Crimea is a peninsula in Eastern Europe, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, almost entirely surrounded by the Black Sea and the smaller Sea of Azov.

After Ukrainian independence in 1991, the central government and the Republic of Crimea clashed, with the region being granted more autonomy. In 2014, the peninsula was occupied by Russian forces and annexed by Russia, but most countries recognise Crimea as Ukrainian territory.

Throughout history, Crimean Tatars suffered from Russia, one of the largest tragedies being Deportation of Crimean Tatars 1944, when the majority of Crimean population were forecully deported from their homeland to the Uzbek SSR.

Crimean Tatar singer Jamala told the world about it in Eurovision 2016, two years after Russia occupied Crimea once again, with the song named "1944". (watch her performance here)

Crimean Tatar language is on the verge of being forgotten, and less people know about Crimean Tatars even existing, so please, educate yourself, tell others about it, share, talk, don't let all the people who fought agains their opressors die for nothing.

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

At the KaZantip musical festival, 1998. Crimea, Ukraine.

[illustratus]

Sunset over the Crimean Coast by Ivan Aivazovsky

[womblegrinch]

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817-1900) - Alexander Pushkin by the cliffs of Gurzuf

Oil on canvas. Painted in 1899.

23.5 x 37 inches, 60 x 94 cm. Estimate: £150,000-200,000.

Sold Sotheby's, London, 4 July 2024 for £336,000 incl B.P.

Gurzuf is located on the coast of Crimea, Ukraine.

Russian paintings at auction have been a bit sparse since the invasion, but I've posted a number of Aivazovsky's paintings in the past.

[mariacallous]

Since February 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has spawned a range of viral slogans, memes, and images that continue to shape public perceptions of the war. There is the ominous Russian Z, the call to “be brave like Ukraine,” and a Ukrainian soldier giving the middle finger to a sinking Russian warship. Among the lesser-known memes is one based on a song that says, in Ukrainian, “Our national idea: Leave us the fuck alone.”

What most Ukrainians want, passionately, is to be left alone by Russia. They do not want to be considered Russian; they do not want to be brought back under Moscow’s rule; they do not want to “rediscover,” at gunpoint, what the Kremlin believes is Ukrainians’ true identity. Instead, they wish to be treated as a nation that has the right to an independent existence. Most importantly, Ukrainians do not want to be invaded, annexed, displaced, murdered, plundered, tortured, abducted, and raped in the name of the mythical “historical unity” and “East Slavic brotherhood” that shape Russian President Vladimir Putin’s thinking.

But is coexistence even possible, given the intensity of Russian feelings toward Ukraine, the long-standing Russian belief in the unity of the two nations, and Moscow’s insistence on ownership over the Kyivan Rus patrimony?

During the final years of my doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin, I worked as a research assistant to political scientist Nadav Shelef. My task was to identify irredentist governments, parties, and political movements: those who believed that parts of their homeland were controlled by a foreign state and sought to reclaim them. There were partitioned homelands I already knew much about, such as Israel and Palestine, Crimea, Taiwan, Kashmir, the territories lost by Hungary post-World War I, Northern Ireland, and Serbia and Kosovo.

But there were also many cases that even I, a Ph.D. candidate specializing in conflict, had heard only vaguely about or not at all. Indeed, Shelef’s key insight was that “there are many, often unnoticed instances of once-voluble claims to lost homeland territory, melting away.” Few Germans still desire East Prussia and Königsberg, now Russian Kaliningrad; Poles reconciled themselves to the loss of Lviv, a city for which they doggedly fought in 1918; and Italians have given up on retaking the northern Adriatic coast, the very demand that gave birth to the term “irredenta.”

There is no reason why, in the future, the Russian desire to control or conquer Ukraine cannot be added to the list of forgotten claims. Something along these lines happened before. In 1914, the Russian imperial government considered Galicia—a historic region encompassing what is now western Ukraine and southeastern Poland—to be Russian land that needed to be reunited with the rest of the empire. In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland on the pretext of unifying the Ukrainians of Galicia and Volhynia with their homeland. But now, even the most radical Russian nationalists typically do not wish to rule western Ukraine.

It will be exceptionally hard to change Russian attitudes toward Ukraine but not impossible. This task is essential if we—Ukrainians, anti-war Russians, the world—want the invasion and genocide that started in 2022 to be the last Russian attempt to destroy the country.

The Russian obsession with Ukraine is driven by two factors: identity and security (both national security and the security of Russia’s autocratic regime). Thus, to ensure that future, Russian rulers do not intend to destroy Ukraine; Ukraine’s centrality to both Russian national identity and the Kremlin’s security perceptions will have to change.

Security is a more technical issue than identity and therefore arguably easier to address. This is why, since 2014, politicians, academics, and policy analysts have preferred to focus on this dimension of the conflict. Over the years, they have put forward schemes to halt the violence in the Donbas and later the full-scale war that center on which alliances Ukraine should or should not belong to, the weapons it can possess, and how it ought to carry out its defense policies.

Indeed, security issues should not be overlooked. The liberation of Ukrainian territories currently under occupation is essential to save lives. And I am convinced that Ukraine should join NATO. Even if NATO membership would not prevent Russia from trying to divide, destabilize, and control Ukraine, it would most likely stop Russia from physically destroying it. Russian leaders, all their saber-rattling and borderline apocalyptic rhetoric aside, are expansionist but not suicidal. They want to control Ukraine—but not at the cost of destroying their own rule, palaces, and yachts. The threat of a war against NATO is the most effective deterrent against a future Russian invasion.

But identity, not security, has historically been the main driver of Russian aggression. The sticking point is not Ukrainian policy but Russian perceptions of Ukraine and its right to exist as a sovereign state. Without addressing this, security arrangements cannot effect lasting change.

The good news is that the widespread belief in the historical unity and shared origin of Russians and Ukrainians is not a sacred, primordial truth but a relatively recent construct: a product of the 19th-century writings and activism of Russian nationalist historians. Like every other national myth, it can change over time. This will not happen overnight. But it is not uncharted territory either, and history teaches us how this shift in identity can be achieved, if and when the Kremlin decides to do so.

Ukraine’s experience under Soviet rule demonstrates the vital role education plays in shaping popular belief. The core of the 1920s Ukrainization process that followed the dissolution of the Russian Empire was education, which introduced children to the core tenets of Communist ideology and promoted a distinct Ukrainian identity. Indeed, one of the key reasons for Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s anti-Ukrainian policies the following decade was the success of Ukrainian-language primary education, which challenged the class-based and, later, Russo-centric nature of the Soviet Union.

The fight against antisemitism is another example of how education changes attitudes over time. Antisemitism was widespread in early 20th-century Ukraine, so when Soviet authorities decided to eradicate anti-Jewish prejudice in the 1920s, they adopted a wide range of policies, from criminalizing xenophobia to designing school curricula that promoted ethnic equality and harmony. Less than two decades later, during the Holocaust, younger generations of Soviet Ukrainians were substantially more likely to help Jews than residents of neighboring Moldova, which had not seen similar attempts to eradicate antisemitism.

Laying the groundwork for a change in Russian attitudes should therefore start in history textbooks. Instead of being taught that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, divided by the tragedy of Soviet collapse and nefarious Western machinations, Russian students might learn to respect Ukraine’s distinct nationhood. It will take years, possibly even decades, for such ideas to become commonplace, but once they do, this will secure peace more than any externally imposed security guarantee. Similarly, instead of funding films, plays, and exhibitions that promote Russian-Ukrainian historical unity and repudiate Ukraine’s independence, the Russian government might support cultural works that reject neoimperial, expansionist narratives. Financial support for a certain type of popular culture is a political choice, and the Kremlin can change its priorities at will.

Liberals and those committed to a peaceful and democratic Russia must also articulate a clear vision of what Russia is, its history, and its place in the world. They must not cede the development of a national identity to Communists, nationalists, and the restorationists of failed empires. Russians need to learn, understand, and come to believe that Ukraine is a different country and not a severed limb of Russia, that Ukrainians are not Russians who speak in a funny dialect, and that the “Russian world” is an invention of politicians seeking resources and prestige.

Luckily, this change in identity does not even require Russia to become a democracy and could be accomplished without major investment or institutional reforms; the only thing that is needed is time and a political leadership genuinely committed to changing popular attitudes. Such a change might even be beneficial for Russia’s autocrats, as it would alleviate the Kremlin’s deep-seated fear that if Ukrainians were able to establish a democracy, then the presumably fraternal Russians might as well.

Russia, as a popular saying goes, is a country with an unpredictable past. Such a change of national identity and historical mythology is not at all inconceivable.

The impetus for this change should ultimately come from within Russia, but Ukraine can make it easier for Russians to accept its independence and distinct identity. Over the centuries, Russian control over Ukraine hinged on the existence of large groups within Ukraine whose members supported, or at least acquiesced to, being ruled from Moscow or St. Petersburg. These groups changed over time, from Cossack elites to Little Russian intellectuals to the Russian-speaking urban working class to those nostalgic for the Soviet Union.

These people provided Moscow or Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian governments with legitimacy, local knowledge, public support, and normative reinforcement of the idea of Russia and Ukraine as part of a larger whole. Without local support, Russian control cannot be maintained, and the narrative of unity underlying Russian strategy will eventually collapse.

By 2022, for the first time in its long history, the population of Ukraine was not deeply divided from within, and this cohesion was crucial to the successful defense of the country. Had the people of Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Kherson, or soldiers hailing from these areas, viewed the Russian army as liberators rather than invaders, Ukraine would have almost certainly lost the war. Indeed, this is exactly what the Kremlin and many Western observers expected. But the Ukraine of 2022 was not the Ukraine of 1917 or 1991.

For Ukraine, the implications of this national cohesion are profound. Internally, a record number of Ukraine’s residents are now committed to independence, and ever more Ukrainians are switching from speaking both Russian and Ukrainian to speaking only Ukrainian. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Kyiv passed laws that banned Soviet and Communist symbols and names from street and city names and public spaces. But since the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian towns have also started removing monuments and place names associated with the pre-1917 Russian Empire—and the push for these changes is coming from below, not from Kyiv.

Many Ukrainians have cut off contact with friends and relatives in Russia who support the Kremlin’s narrative or who refuse to believe that the Russian army is committing atrocities or bombing civilian targets. Such estrangement is tragic on the personal level, but it reinforces the message that citizens of Russia and Ukraine are, contrary to Putin’s claims, members of two distinct—and now hostile—communities.

These changes have had an impact further afield. In 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion, only a third of Americans could place Ukraine on a map. Now, anyone who watches the news or reads a newspaper knows about the country. The number of foreigners learning Ukrainian has skyrocketed, and museums and cultural institutions across the globe no longer automatically label artists born in what is now Ukraine as “Russian.” Following the full-scale Russian invasion, the European Parliament and national legislatures of Brazil, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and several other states recognized the Holodomor—the 1932-33 famine engineered by the Soviet regime—as genocide. Hopefully, this recent shift in foreign attitudes will strengthen both Ukraine and those Russians who advocate restraint and responsible statecraft.

Ukrainian national identity is still a work in progress, and after the war, Ukrainians will have to address painful issues. But the war is also an opportunity to strengthen Ukraine’s inclusive identity and create a pantheon of new heroes who fought for Ukrainian independence. The choice of identity and historical narrative is a decision for Ukraine alone, but it will have implications for Russia’s willingness to view Ukraine as a separate nation and for the Kremlin’s ability to secure local support if it tries to dominate or conquer Ukraine once again.

Meanwhile, the West—while unable to dictate how Russians and Ukrainians should structure their societies, national identities, and foreign relations—can help contain Russia, shore up Ukrainian democracy, and give Kyiv the tools it needs to protect itself.

In addition to the NATO collective defense protection, the European Union will also be crucial to securing Ukraine’s future, and Ukraine is finally on track to become a member state. EU membership is not a panacea and cannot prevent economic crisis, mismanagement, corruption, xenophobia, and even autocracy. But it is nonetheless an effective tool to minimize and confront these vices, and the accession process that requires candidate states to meet multiple membership criteria is an important catalyst for reforms. The prize of EU membership is also a powerful incentive for society to tolerate the social and political price of potentially painful changes.

Having endured repression, invasion, famine, and genocide, Ukrainians justifiably want Russia to finally leave them alone. Whether this will happen depends first and foremost on Russian society and its willingness to respect Ukrainian sovereignty, abandon irredentist dreams, and shed its widespread belief in the unity of the two nations. Neither Ukraine nor any other country can force Russians to abandon their beliefs. Only through deep internal change will Russia’s intent to destroy Ukraine be consigned to painful history and never again be policy.

What Ukraine can do is maintain its unity by wholeheartedly embracing democracy and prioritizing a unique, inclusive civic national identity over exclusionary and radical alternatives. Western partners ought to assist Ukraine in this process, but the initiative and the main effort should come from within Ukraine itself. The key lesson of history is that only a strong, united, and democratic Ukraine can meet the challenges of independent statehood and survive.

[alcestas-sloboda]

Above the Crimean coast // Crimea. Kekeneiz // Crimean coast by Ivan Trush