They helped orchestrate a referendum on the peninsula, and pro-Kremlin officials said that according to the results, residents almost unanimously wanted to be part of Russia.
Putin’s popularity skyrocketed. His approval rating, which was beginning to decline, rose from 65% in January of that year to 86% in June, according to the independent Russian pollster Levada.
“Krymnash!” —“Crimea is ours!”—became a mobilizing slogan in Russia. But only a handful of countries, such as North Korea and Sudan, have recognized the annexation.
Putin has called Crimea “a holy place” and has gone after those who publicly say it belongs to Ukraine. Zelenskyy has repeatedly said that “Russia will not be able to steal” the peninsula.
A STRATEGIC GOOD
Its unique position on the Black Sea makes Crimea a strategically important asset to whoever controls it, and Russia has fought over it for centuries.
Crimea was home to the Tatars, a Turkic ethnic group, when the Russian Empire annexed it in the 18th century. It briefly regained its independence as a Tatar republic two centuries later, until it was absorbed by the Soviet Union.
In 1944, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deported nearly 200,000 Tatars, a third of the Crimean population, to Central Asia, 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) to the east. He had accused them of collaborating with Nazi Germany, something that historians have shown to be false. Half of them died of starvation and hardship in the following 18 months.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine in 1954 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the unification of Moscow and Kiev, but that symbolic act failed when, in 1991, the USSR fell and Ukraine gained its independence.
“Most Russians, as well as the Russian political elite, have always considered the handing over of Crimea to Ukraine to be unfair. They have always perceived Crimea as Russian,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a research fellow at the Carnegie Center for Russia and Eurasia, told The Associated Press.
But Russia always kept a wedge in the door: its Black Sea fleet was based in Sevastopol, and Crimea—as part of Ukraine—accepted it.
The base was of great military value to Moscow and that was probably a crucial factor in the Kremlin’s decision to annex the peninsula in 2014, said Graeme Robertson of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
“Sevastopol is really important for the Russian fleet and for access to the Mediterranean and for Russia to be a power capable of closing off the Black Sea and controlling the economic viability and political viability of Ukraine,” Robertson said. “I think that is, after all, the reason for the annexation.”
The repression of Crimean Tatars continued under Putin, despite Moscow’s denial of discrimination. Some 30,000 fled the peninsula between 2014 and 2021.
Those who stayed faced relentless repression by Russia, which, while rejecting accusations of discrimination, has dissolved the main representative body of the Tatars and some religious groups. Some 80 Tatars are serving sentences and 15 activists are missing, Amnesty International reported in 2015.
THE SENTIMENTAL VALUE OF THE CRIMEA
Beyond its strategic value, Crimea has always provoked a particular reaction among Russians, “something sentimental and almost religious,” said Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London.
It could be based in part on history.
Sevastopol was the favorite vacation spot for Nicholas II, the last of the Russian tsars, and his family. The southern city of Yalta was a favorite vacation destination in Soviet times, and many sanatoriums were set up on the site. There Stalin, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in 1945 to decide the fate of Germany and Europe after World War II.
In Foros, another seaside resort near Sevastopol, were the official dachas of the Soviet leaders. President Mikhail Gorbachev was vacationing there in 1991 when hardliners opposed to his policies placed him under house arrest during a failed coup attempt.
A poll conducted by Greene and Robertson before and after Putin’s 2014 takeover of Crimea found a change in the attitude of respondents.
“Sharply, they saw corruption as less important in the country,” Greene said. “They were more optimistic about the economy, both personally and in terms of their own well-being, and how the country would fare in the future. And his memories of 1990 improved.
The optimism lasted four years, beginning to wane in 2018. Putin’s popularity fell to less than 70% in the middle of that year, after Putin was re-elected and took unpopular economic measures such as raising the retirement age.
The full-fledged war in Ukraine in 2022 regained some of the buoyant effect, Greene said, but if the Kremlin loses Crimea or requires a major effort to hold it, people “might come to the conclusion that Putin is not the right man for the job.”
According to the analyst Stanovaya, few in Moscow believe that Ukraine is capable of recovering Crimea, despite the increasing attacks on an asset so prized by Putin as the Kerch bridge, which links the peninsula with Russia, and other targets such as a warehouse of ammunition on July 22.
“Of course, it is irritating, but they are considered a political investment directed at the Ukrainian public opinion and the West,” he said.
Many Russians flocked to the Crimean spas this summer. After the July attack on the bridge, the Russian press found many vacationers not at all intimidated by the fact that the authorities told them to travel to the peninsula via the occupied parts of Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson even though all three are in the first line of fire.
Still, tourism is down, some beaches have been turned into fortifications, and hotels and lodges report plenty of vacancies.
WHAT IS AT STAKE FOR UKRAINE IN THE CRIMEA
In 2014, when the annexation took place, Crimea had been part of Ukraine for 60 years. Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of independent Ukraine, said kyiv had invested some $100 billion in the peninsula between 1991 and 2014.
It has also become part of the Ukrainian identity.
Before the invasion, Zelenskyy had made diplomatic efforts to try to retake it, but once Russian troops crossed the border, kyiv began talking loudly about retaking the peninsula by force.
It will not be easy, because “Russia tries to install as many different kinds of weapons as possible there,” military analyst Roman Svytan told the AP, because its position between the Black Sea and the Azov Sea gives Moscow “the military key of the entire region”.
From a security point of view, Ukraine needs full independence from Crimea and control over activities in the Black Sea, Ribertson said.
“A deal ceding Crimea to the Russians as part of a peace treaty would be a very hard sell in Ukraine,” he said.
Therefore, it is very important for kyiv “to indicate to the West that in this war it is about recovering all of Ukraine,” he added. “This is not about taking back eastern Ukraine and southern Ukraine and then seeking a deal.”
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Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia contributed to this report.
FOUNTAIN: Associated Press
