Taking over Crimea is awful and completely predictable, as is the land corridor from Crimea to Russia that will be opened to the north. Russia is scared of losing control of the naval base it has held there for over a century.

However the collaboration with the ISS is something that forces communication and trust on a joint project at a high level. It is not just that it is important for space research, it is even more important for soft diplomacy. It forces the governments into situations where they have to talk about something other than sabre rattling on a regular basis.

To be fair, most of people living there are Russians, and they seem to be happy to live in Russia.

Of course the way Russia took Crimea wasn't very good, and was just to secure naval base, but they did it without bloodshed, which wouldn't be possible if people there wanted to stay with Ukraine.

That was a karma 4 acccount and this is much later, but...

The main problem imho is that the last time destabilization and military [threat] was used to steal land areas around Europe, it was by guys in mustasches... And the motivation was similar -- "protect" Russi... German speaking populations.

And right now the same methods are used in another area. Just like the 1930s, too.

That second area will hardly be the last, if it works again. "Peace in our time" failed last time...

As an European, this is just scary and everything really needs to be done to stop this before there is another big war.

Having empathy doesn't mean we should fall into the politician's fallacy. Unless you can demonstrate how would stopping the collaboration actually help the Crimeans, it's nothing but demagogy.