Russia's actions in taking over Crimea, right or wrong?

[The Magistrate]

17. As They Say, Ma'am, That Is Not Even Wrong....

That comment is analogous to asking whether someone playing playing checkers has got his opponent into checkmate yet; it invokes concepts that simply do not apply.

Your comment implies Ukraine annexed the Crimea; it did not. The territory was shifted from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Mr. Khrushchev, and neither Russia nor Ukraine, let alone Crimea, was consulted. That Crimea was part of Ukraine when the Soviet Union dissolved does not reflect any acquisitive bent on the part of Ukraine's authorities. All boundaries in that part of the world, indeed just about all boundaries east of the Rhine in Europe, are the result of force majeure on somebody's part, with the only means of consultation with local inhabitants in the matter generally being whether they had the energy, wit, or wherewithal to either kill off their neighbors of different ethnicity or flee to friendly jurisdictions in the chaos of the years immediately following World War Two before they were so done by neighbors of different ethnicity. None of it was, or is, just, but any attempt to rectify it, particularly to rectify by means of military force and invasion, is deeply unsettling to a habit of peace and inviolability of borders that has built up in Europe over the last half century or so. The potential consequences of breaking this consensus that the map is frozen are devastating.