Ukraine has stepped up its attacks on Crimea in an effort to cut the peninsula off from Russian supplies, the Kyiv Post reported. Russia took Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and Kyiv’s drones and missiles now hit it regularly, in what Ukraine calls justified retaliation against military sites, energy facilities and supply routes.
How Russia took it
The seizure came during Kyiv’s 2014 pro-EU revolution, which toppled Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovych. Masked gunmen without insignia occupied government buildings and strategic points. Moscow then staged what it called a referendum on joining Russia, with the vote held at gunpoint. Ukraine and the West denounced it as a sham and imposed sanctions.
Few countries accept the annexation. North Korea and Venezuela are among the handful that do. The move was followed by a war in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow-backed and Moscow-led separatists fought Kyiv. It killed thousands between 2014 and 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale offensive.
Life on the peninsula is tightly controlled. Ukrainian symbols are banned, and locals are essentially required to take Russian passports. Many who did not want to live under Moscow left. Crimean Tatars, a majority-Muslim, Turkic-speaking people who lived on the peninsula for centuries, have faced repression. Stalin deported them en masse in 1944, mostly to Central Asia; they began returning in 1989. After 2014, Moscow banned their governing body, the Mejilis, which moved to Kyiv, and held a series of high-profile trials of Crimean Tatars.
A base for the war
In February 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine from the north, east and south, including from Crimea, where it had spent months massing troops and equipment. The Black Sea Fleet has its base at Sevastopol under 1990s deals that let Russia keep its ships in the port.
Ukraine is no major naval power, yet it has scored successes at sea, with naval drones sinking several Russian ships. In September 2023, a massive Ukrainian attack hit the fleet’s headquarters at Sevastopol and killed a top commander and officers.
The bridge
Moscow poured billions into the peninsula, including a bridge to the Russian mainland that Putin inaugurated in 2018. The 19-kilometer (12-mile) road and rail link served as a key logistics route for the Russian army when it began its attack on Ukraine. In October 2022, Kyiv blew up part of it in an attack its security services claimed. Moscow sentenced eight men to life over that attack; they have said they were innocent or were used by Kyiv without their knowledge.
Older history
Crimea became part of the Russian Empire under Catherine II in the 1780s, after victories over the Ottoman Empire. Her trip there gave rise to the legend of the Potemkin villages. In early 1945, after Nazi occupation, it hosted the Yalta Conference of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. The Soviet Union transferred it from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian one in 1954, largely a symbolic step that gained huge significance after the USSR fell apart. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Crimea became part of independent Ukraine.
