Afghanistan: Putin, marking Crimea annexation, lays claim to historic mantle --- MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin sought to place himself in the ranks of Russia’s greatest leaders Friday, reaching deep into his nation’s history to assert that the annexation of Crimea was a milestone for the centuries. -- In his first visit to Crimea since he seized the peninsula in March, Putin paid a triumphant call on a territory that had been Russian since the time of Catherine the Great, but since 1991 had been part of an independent Ukraine. The annexation set off an international crisis that has pushed Ukraine to the brink of war and has led to the greatest tensions between Russia and the West since the depths of the Cold War. -- Putin reeled off a list of highlights of Russian nationhood that began with the naming of the Black Sea port city of Sevastopol in 1784. -- “I am sure that 2014 will become part of the city’s chronicle, and the chronicle of our entire country, as the year in which the people here decided firmly to be together with Russia,” Putin said. In March, Crimeans voted in a referendum in which 97 percent were said to have chosen to bind themselves to Russia. -- “Thus they proved their loyalty to historical truth and to the memory of our predecessors,” he said at the port as 10 gray warships floated behind him. “We have lots of work in front of us, but we will overcome all the difficulties, because we are together, and that means we have become stronger.” --- On an emotional holiday that marks the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, Putin flew to Sevastopol after presiding over a triumphal military parade through Moscow’s Red Square. There and in cities across Russia’s vast territory, scores of tanks, rocket launchers and intercontinental ballistic missiles delivered a show of military prowess that Putin has threatened to further unleash on Ukraine if he judges Russian interests to be threatened. -- Putin has long aspired to be one of Russia’s epoch-defining leaders, saying that the breakup of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, in part because “tens of millions” of ethnic Russians found themselves outside the borders of Russia. The Russian president has made it his mission to rebuild a country powerful enough to demand the same respect once accorded to the Soviet Union, analysts have said.