Area the size of Crimea?

Ukraine and the Crimea are much in the news at present, following the political upheaval and annexation by Russia. Today's Independent cartoon was:

I may be having a sense of humour failure, completely missing the joke behind the cartoon: but the area is wrong. The actual area (actual in the sense of 'as given by Google') is 26,100 sq km, a number I knew having some weeks back googled it, and compared it to the universally accepted (at least in England) unit of size, the area in comparison with the size of Wales– 20,761 sq km.

Of course, this being 2014, whatever you can think of, there is a website for it, and there is a calculator site.

The site's author, Simon Kelk, also gives calculators for comparison with the length of a London bus, comparison with the weight of an African elephant, and certain others. (It doesn't, though, include the definition I use of the time it takes to solve a chess problem of some moderate difficulty, namely the time it takes an Englishman to make a cup of tea, which to me is one standard unit of time. (An even more English unit of time, namely the time to devote to a much harder chess problem, is Sherlock Holme's two pipe problem. I once had leading Counsel tell me, when explaining his proposed charges, that the questions I was asking were a two pipe problem. Alas, being ill-read, at the time I didn't understand his reference).

One more snippet on the Crimea: its population, in 2007 was estimated to be 2.4m, as compared to Wales' 2013 figure of 3.1m. So, roughly 30% larger land area, but 20% fewer people.

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