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The first paragraph really spoke to me, because that is how I spent every summer for the first 14 years of my life. My family took a trip from Kiev to Yalta as a summer vacation. The joy and excitement mixed with hot, gross conditions of the train are spot on. I will forever hold onto those memories as some of my most precious.

This year I went back to Kiev for the first time in well over a decade since I moved to the US. To see my family, friends, as well as show my wife all of the places and the way that I grew up.

Due to the current political climate and overall conditions in Crimea going there was not even an option for us. A real disappointment as some of my most cherished memories were formed there.

I am pretty sure that visiting Crimea would have been a safer option to visiting Kiev. Many, many Ukrainian citizens continue to visit the peninsula even today.
This isn't something to have an argument over. However, while in Kiev I did not see a single armed person nor any signs of conflict. My visit was almost a month ago.

On the flip side, Crimean border is protected by armed forces on behalf of Russia and overall sentiment in the peninsula is not that favorable to Ukrainians.

Though I do agree that many still visit. My only point was that I did not feel comfortable.

Any examples of unusual unsafe conditions in Kyiv?
> They called the Tatars “heathens,” “uncivilized” and “warlike,” evoking old stereotypes about the Turks.

That resonated with me. My childhood is peppered with memories of Russians, who were bused in at some point by the Soviet Union to take over administrative positions, telling me to speak a "human" language - Russian instead of my native language (implying I was sub-human). I always remember that and am sad for them for living with that kind of prejudice (especially when you tell that to a child).

The Tatars, 300 years ago, were excellent warriors and horsemen.

They would raid the nearby Ukrainian and Russian villages and sell the villagers into slavery. In one year, 1769, they captured 20,000 and sold them in slave markets in the Ottoman Empire.

From 1500 to 1700 or so, between 1 and 2 million Slavs were captured and sold off into slavery.

The end of the Crimean Khanate is about as distant in history as the Revolutionary War that started the USA. Of course Tatars don't do this anymore, but some people unfortunately prefer to remember old grievances and raise them again and again.

That's why when I see photos of the Syrian war, I see so many blond and blue eyed children. I assume they are the descendants of the Slavs(slaves) you are talking about
Syria is next to Turkey (which is itself populated by a lot of Central Asians; Turkmen are not native of Turkey), which is next to Europe. These two countries and Lebanon are on the morphological boundary between "Europeans" and "Arabs". (This is a gross simplification.)
You have no clue what you're talking about. To begin with, Slavs != "slaves". Learn the etymology of the word and read up on some history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs Once you're done, use Wikipea or Google to look for Indo-Iranians, their physical characteristics and their movement from 4000-1000 BCE ((TL;DR blue-eyed people didn't originate in Europe). Good luck.
Origin of the word Slave : "The term slave has its origins in the word slav. The slavs, who inhabited a large part of Eastern Europe, were taken as slaves by the Muslims of Spain during the ninth century AD."

Source BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafr...

Maybe review the etymology of the word "slave" before you jump to conclusions about GP's cluelessness.
In terms of Kingdom of the Dead, what is interesting is that the Black Plague (which would kill about 1/3 of Europe) is speculated by some to have entered Europe from Crimea due to the siege of Caffa (also spelled Kaffa) by the Tatars. The Tatar army was devastated by the Plague, and before they left, they catapulted the infected bodies into the city. In the city were Genoese traders who left the city and took the Plague back to Europe.
Can someone explain what is the meaning of "madeleine" here? Is it referring to the famous incident of "let them eat cake"? I'm not familiar with it being used to refer to anything other than food.
It's a reference to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, wherein he famously recounted how, upon eating a "dispiriting" madeline as an adult, he was abruptly and involuntarily taken back to the emotions of childhood, when he and an aunt shared madelines every Sunday. Since then, it's shorthand for "something that emotionally transports us back to happier times," more or less.
I think it's "one that evokes a memory": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/madeleine

That seems to be how it's used in the article and some of the comments here:

"Crimea was the ideal site for this post-Soviet reunion, since it was the place where so many children, now adults, had spent their happy summer vacations, flocking there from all over the Soviet Union. For post-Soviet people, Crimea was a gigantic madeleine."

I see others have beat me to a response. m-w also has a paragraph about it:

"The madeleine is said to have been named after a 19th-century French cook named Madeleine Paumier, but it was the French author Marcel Proust who immortalized the pastry in his 1913 book Swann's Way, the first volume of his seven-part novel Remembrance of Things Past. In that work, a taste of tea-soaked cake evokes a surge of memory and nostalgia. As more and more readers chewed on the profound mnemonic power attributed to a mere morsel of cake, the word madeleine itself became a designation for anything that evokes a memory."

I had never heard of it either.

>since it was the place where so many children, now adults, had spent their happy summer vacations, flocking there from all over the Soviet Union.

yes, Russian climate makes you yearn for hot climate vacation near sea and giving the Iron Curtain there weren't much options. These days Russians go en mass to Mediterranean : Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Chernogorya, Italy, Spain. Despite all the propaganda they aren't going to Crimea. As joke has it these days "it is so quiet on Crimea beaches that one can hear Russian tourists having drink party ("buhayuschih") on Egypt beaches"

This is also the reason that you sometimes find Madeleines flavored with earl gray tea. It's something of a literary joke about Proust, who helped make the cookies famous.
Technically, they are small cakes, not cookies.
I wasn't familiar with the term, but Wiktionary has some good hints:

n. A small gateau or sponge cake, often shaped like an elongated scallop shell.

n. Something which brings back a memory; a source of nostalgia or evocative memories (used with reference to its function in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time).

It's a reference to Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." The taste brings forth memories involuntarily.
Well, it does make me want to go and see for myself. It could be more interesting if I knew some russian.