Okay, Let's

I think that you summed it up pretty well, and there's only a couple of things I can add. Before the shit hit the fan in the Ukraine, there was an ongoing dispute about electricity, or maybe it was natural gas, or both. It seems that the wires and/or gas lines cross the Ukraine going from one part of Russia to another. After the Soviet Union broke up, they kept this arrangement going because it was convenient for both parties. The Ukrainians got their power at a discount as part of the deal, and I think they also got some kind of payment on the side. A year or two ago, a dispute arose about the payment plan. I suppose the contract expired and they were trying to negotiate a new one. At one point the Russians threatened to cut off the power supply to the Ukraine, and the Ukrainians threatened to stop allowing the power lines to cross their territory. I don't know if they ever worked out a deal or not, but it goes to show that there was tension between the two countries even before this other stuff got started.

This latest row started out when the Ukrainian legislature passed a bill to make overtures to join the European Union and their president refused to approve it. There was a big uproar, which resulted in the Ukrainian president running to Russia for support. While he was out of town, the legislature declared his office vacated and elected a new president. The Russian-Ukrainians were not pleased with this development and started thinking about seceding from the Ukraine and joining Russia. You know the rest of that story.

The Tartars are the wild card in this deck. When Stalin was in power, he deported most of the Tartars out of the Ukraine and, after the Soviet Union broke up, some of them started trickling back in. If this keeps up, they will eventually become a force to be reckoned with, if they haven't already. Last I heard, the Tartars had not declared themselves to be on either side, and there was speculation that they might form a side of their own.

I think that the Tartars are descendants of the Mongolians that over ran the region with Genghis Khan back in the 15th Century, or the Huns led by Attila that came from the same place a thousand years earlier. Either way, they have been there a long time and have come to believe that they own the place, which is probably why Stalin had them deported.

You may remember that, when you see a reference to the Tartars in a history book, sometimes it's spelled "Tatars" instead of "Tartars". I always wondered about that until, one day, we had some real Tartars come to Cheboygan. It was a song and dance troupe that was touring the country and played at our opera house one night. I didn't get to talk to any of them personally, but I noticed that the guy who was announcing the acts in English pronounced it something like "Tah-tahs". This leads me to believe that the Tartars, like many New Yorkers, can't seem to pronounce the letter "R" properly. I don't know if it's genetics or something in the water. Now that I think of it, some Englishmen have this problem too, and maybe this announcer guy learned his English from one of them. Anyway, that would explain the confusion about the spelling. If the Tartars can't even pronounce their name correctly, how can we expect the writers of history books to spell it correctly? I'm going with "Tartars" because that's how it's spelled on the labels of bottles of Tartar Sauce. I don't like the stuff myself, nor am I fond of raw hamburger but, as far as I know, both of those things were actually invented by the Tartars, so that must be the correct spelling.