AAAAAGHGHGAAGGHGHAGHHG.
ok. this is the last time i'll do this. it's not technically wrong, it's just fucking skewed for political purposes. this is all it says for roughly four thousand years of vaguely understood history:
" In its early history, it was colonized and occupied repeatedly - by the Greeks, Romans, Huns, the Byzantine Empire, among others."
early? greeks? that's not early.
the thracian and iranian occupations are early. scythians. sarmatians. cimmerians.
now, when we speaking of colonization and occupation that implicitly suggests that there is an indigenous group being colonized and occupied. and would you like to guess who that group was?
the iranian influence was slowly pushed out over thousands of years. the article skipped the goths, who were extremely important in the destruction horizon on two levels - both the one they created and the one that set off their own migration. probably cause they thought of eye makeup.
herodotus is explicit - there were the "royal scythians" and sarmatians who commanded the armies and were of iranian backgrounds, and then there were the "agricultural scythians" who farmed the land and were their slaves.
now, on the one hand it's easy to connect these agricultural scythians to the broad slavic speaking areas through archaeological continuity. on other other hand, it's easy to point out that all other possible contenders were both living far away at the time and not at all agricultural. so, the agricultural scythians are quite obviously slavic groups, extending over a wide area.
throughout all of these invasions, the slavs remained tied to the land.
so, yeah, there's been various turkic groups in the area for the last several centuries. but they kind of just showed up, and were merely at the end of a long process of colonizing and occupying an area that is indigenously slavic.
i don't want to come off as the supremacists i'm criticizing, so this discussion is now officially dropped.
http://www.voanews.com/content/the-history-of-crimea---in-brief-/1860431.html