Elsewhere I was challenged to give what I saw as a Russian perspective on these events:
This was part of my answer:
Let's start with how they feel about American rhetoric: Hillary Clinton said that Putin’s concern for Russians in Ukraine is like Hitler’s concern for Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Now considering the cost to Russia of defeating Hitler, especially when compared to the cost to the USA, that is clearly intended as a direct insult and
In fact, Lavrov said in a statement:
"“Inviting us to [engage in] dialogue and pledging to us their commitment to facilitate the stabilization of the situation, our partners are not being fully consistent, as simultaneously, speaking at international forums, including the UN General Assembly, they encourage very confrontational and quarrelsome statements, which border on insults and clearly do not promote the right atmosphere for normal dialogue. This ambivalence and duplicity is very obstructive.”
In fact Hillary demonstrated either extreme ignorance of the facts or demonstrated an Orwellian level of doublethink: 90% of all Nazi German casualties were killed by Soviets. As Russia sees it, America didn't win the war. Russia did. And they also lost 30 million people in the process. America lost nothing by comparison.
In fact throughout history, Turks, Poles, Swedes, French, Germans, British, and Japanese have each invaded Russia more than once.
That might make them slightly defensive.
Lets look at how they might remember their 170 year history in Crimea: At the 2-year Siege of Sevastopol in 1854, 175,000 British, French, Turkish, German, Italian, Polish and Swiss soldiers faced 35,000 Russian soldiers who defended Russian Crimea. Then in WW2 at the Siege of Sevastopol there was a year long siege with more than 200,000 German, Romanian, Italian and Bulgarian forces facing 106,000 Soviet soldiers who defended Russian Crimea.
That might explain the pride Crimean Russians have about being Russian.
And how did Crimea ened up Russian in the first place? Wikipedia tells us:
The area remained the site of overlapping interests and contact between the early medieval Slavic, Turkic and Greek spheres, and became a center of slave trade in particular, the word slave itself deriving from the ethnonym of the Slavs who were sold to the Muslim world and Byzantium during this period. In the 1230s, this status quo was swept away by the Mongol invasions, and Crimea was incorporated into the territory of the Golden Horde throughout the 14th century.
The Crimean Khanate, a state ruled by Crimean Tatars and generally subject to the Ottoman Empire, succeeded the Golden Horde and lasted from 1441 to 1783.[8] Until the late 18th century, Crimean Tatars maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire, exporting about 2 million slaves from Russia and Ukraine over the period 1500–1700.[9] The Khanate was conquered by the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great in 1783. From 1853 to 1856, the peninsula was the site of the principal engagements of the Crimean War, a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia..
BTW the population never asked to be part of Ukraine. But they did ask to be part of Russia.
and there you have it in a nutshell...thank you Mikey. 
)
is flying 
...think the population who reside in the country know the score 
