More on Crimea and the "Election"

The 97% or so of voters in Crimea who chose union with Russia yesterday were either totally intimidated to vote in that way or else the results given to the public were phony.  One does not need to be a genius to understand that basic fact.  Now, however, the full magnitude of the travesty presented by Putin and Moscow is coming out.  To show just how phony the results of the vote were, one need only compare them to a poll taken less than a month ago (but just before the Russian invasion) on the question of the proper relationship between Ukraine and Russia.  Overall, the people in Ukraine were overwhelmingly against a union with Russia.  Only 12% of the population supported such a union.  More important, the poll broke out results by region and specifically reported on the feelings in Crimea, the region that supposedly voted yesterday so overwhelmingly to join Russia.  A few weeks ago, a respected poll found that by a margin of 3 to 2, Crimeans opposed union with Russia.  That union got the support of just 41% of the people of the region.

The ruse of the election is roughly the same as Putin's gambit of having the Russian troops remove the insignias from their uniforms and then denying that the thousands of Russian speaking troops with Russian equipment pouring over the border into Ukraine from Russia were actually Russian forces. 

There ought to be strong consequences for the Russian move into Crimea.