As The New York Times notes, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been fought mostly in a series of grinding land battles, but for the governments in Kyiv and Moscow the Black Sea also has been a vital theater in the war. Russian warships have in recent months fired a series of cruise missiles at Ukrainian targets that are sometimes hundreds of miles away, hitting towns and cities and damaging the country's energy infrastructure.

The Black Sea region, Putin himself has insisted, is as dear to Russians "as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem" is to Jews and Muslims (as noted in a HuffPost article titled "USSR 2.0 From Grozny to Moscow").


As Ascherson puts it: somewhere [along the Black Sea] begins Europe's long, unfinished ballad of yearning for noble savages, for hunter-gatherers in touch with themselves and their ecology, for cowboys, cattle-reivers, gypsies and cossacks, for Bedouin nomads and aboriginals walking their song-lines through the unspoiled wilderness.

https://www.theapricity.com/forum/sh...=1#post7679316

The proto-Indo-Europeans are allotted the contiguous territory to the south of the Finno-Ugric, that is, the resource-poor steppes bordering the Caspian and Black Seas. It is noteworthy that this territory has not been associated with any other language group. The Finno-Ugric homeland, on the other hand, is confidently placed in the resource-rich northern forest zone of Europe extending from the Baltic Sea to the eastern side of the Ural Mountains.

https://www.theapricity.com/forum/sh...42#post7593342