Crimea

A day after White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that Crimea should be “returned” to Ukraine – Russia lashed back saying in no way will Crimea be “given back” to Ukraine, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in response.
“We don’t return our territories. Crimea is a territory of the Russian Federation,” Zakharova said at a weekly news briefing, referring to the Black Sea peninsula that voted in a referendum to join Russia in early 2014.

Next year, Russia will hold a Presidential election and people are beginning to speculate on who might run and win. Thus far, the only candidate to be nominated by any party is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, founder and leader of the opposition LDPR (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia).
The biggest question people are asking is, ‘will Putin run again’. If he decides to do so, I believe he will win by an even larger margin than in his last election.
Here are the top five reasons why.
5. He weathered the economic storm

The speech by the new US permanent representative to the UN Security Council, Nikki Haley, at a Security Council meeting on 3 February backed up the idea that the new administration policy on Crimea will be followed up.

Whaaat??!??

21st Century Wire says…
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour seems quite rattled and reluctant to allow Marine Le Pen, the French presidential favorite, to speak her mind about the situation in Crimea… and CNN’s coverage of it.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour didn’t look too happy while interviewing France’s presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen over the weekend. Amanpour interrupted Le Pen 5 times in a 3-minute segment and was clearly irritated by her objections to the fake news narrative on Ukraine and Crimea.
Here is how the conversation went:

Following up on 2 previous posts:

Ambassador’s view | RT | February 2, 2017 The escalation in eastern Ukraine is again presented in the British media as Russia’s attempt to wage a proxy hybrid war against Kiev’s pro-Western leadership. For fear of an eventual improvement in Russia-US relations, they pray for the sanctions against Russia to stay unless the Minsk Agreements […]

When in 2014, Crimea democratically (and overwhelmingly so) decided to return home to Russia, Barack Obama and the EU lead a charge to economically destroy the peninsula. Of course like with all of the US-EU anti-Russian sanctions, it didn’t work, but what did happen was that they made it far more difficult for people to travel from Europe directly to Crimea.