The clash in Crimea is the fruit of western expansion

[Catherina]

62. The Tatars are not indigenous, they're a fusion of nomadic groups from Genghis Khan's army

As far as constructs go, here's one



I'm not a fan of territorial conquests and artificial borders but if you want to talk history, it started before that. The most 'indigenous' people of modern-day Crimea are the Cumans who were driven out by the Mongol invasion.

And the Crimea-Russia fighting started long before 1944 when the rest of today's dominant powers were doing the same, after the Crimean Khanate captured and enslaved over 3 million Ukrainians, Russians, Belorussians and Poles and sold them as slaves to the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. Heck, it started even before then, we could go back to Genghis Khan whose sons murdered and purged the Crimean Cumans, who allied with the Russians against him at the Battle of Kalka River, to seize Crimea for the Mongol Empire and moved in a bunch of Mongols, Greeks, Turks and Goths who wreaked havoc on Southern Russia until Catherine the Great annexed it in 1783.

Or take it even further before the Mongol invasion. Now that was an invasion.

The Cumans first encountered the Rus' in 1055, which resulted in a peace agreement. In 1061, however, the Cumans invaded and devastated the Rus' Pereiaslav principality.[30] In 1068 at the Alta River, the Cumans defeated the armies of the three sons of Yaroslav the Wise — Iziaslav Yaroslavych, Sviatoslav II Yaroslavych, and Vsevolod Yaroslavych. After the Cuman victory, they repeatedly invaded Ukraine, devastating the land and taking captives, who became either slaves or were sold at markets in the south. The most vulnerable regions were the principalities of Pereiasla, Novhorod-Siverskyi, and Chernihiv.[30] The Cumans initially managed to defeat the Great Prince Vladimir Monomakh of Kievan Rus in 1093 at the Battle of the Stugna River, but they were defeated later by the combined forces of Russian principalities led by Monomakh and forced out of the Rus borders to Caucasus.

...

Genghis Khan defeated the Cumans and their Russian allies at the Battle of Kalka River (in modern Ukraine). The final blow came in 1241, when the Cuman confederacy ceased to exist as a political entity, with the remaining Cuman tribes being dispersed, either becoming subjects and mixing with their Tatar-Mongol conquerors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumans

Stalin's purges of their descendents were nasty indeed, immoral and bloody but territorial conquests usually are. The stuff that came before Stalin's purges wasn't much prettier either. It all depends how far back people go to find a convenient place to point fingers.