Jay,
The link you provided is over two years old, and since that time Sevastopol has most definitely NOT become a closed city, nor has Balaklava, a week ago a contingent of Italian entrepreneurs were visiting Balaklava, and tripadvisor.com has reviews of Balaklava by foreigners that were made just a month ago!
Krimster,
When we were wanting to visit Balaklava and the Secret Soviet Submarine Base we found many references on the internet to tours of the sub base. I am not able to find any now.
My wife has an apartment in Yalta that we seem not to be able to sell. In fact, to transfer and re-register the apartment she learned that she has to physically go to the office of registration in order to make the re-registration. We are both worried about our safety of physically going to Crimea.
To make matters worse, the apartment manager is having a great difficulty in transferring the rent monies to Ukraine to her mother that needs it for monthly taxes and expenses. At the last report, there was a change of banks in Crimea whereby all transactions were to Russian banks and no transfers to Ukraine were allowed.
Due to my Aerospace career, I am not about to set my feet on any land controlled by Russia. I am also worried about my wife traveling to Crimea to try to recover her investment in her apartment in Yalta. This is one f*cked up satellite of Russia.
What is really crazy is that some of her girlfriends tell her of extreme high prices of groceries and empty store shelves, but yet they are still supporting Russia. This is the craziest thing I have experienced in my life! I guess it shows how a large population can be influenced by propaganda!
It reminds me of the leaflet I got when I visited Balaklava. Just a few years ago the propaganda in the leaflet indicated that the USA was going to attack Russia with nuclear weapons.
It seems to me that propaganda from whatever source is so powerful over people that ether have no source of independent news, or are too stupid to have any critical thinking skills.
I think the same thing is happening in the USA concerning the 2016 elections with the corrupt mainstream media.