Why is Crimea so important to Putin?

I can see Russia from my house

Since 2014, and even more so since 2022, Crimea has been a focal point in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. So why is this little peninsula, roughly the size of Massachusetts, so important to Putin? Today we’ll go over the history of Crimea and talk about why Russia has historically been so fixated on controlling it.

Crimea has been settled by a huge range of people through the centuries, the Greeks came in ancient times and many Crimean place names end in -pol, which is derived from the Greek polis. After the Mongol invasions in the middle ages, the peninsula was settled by the Tatars, who were a Muslim Turkic group descended from Central Asian nomads. During the late middle ages this little kingdom was under the protection of the Ottoman Turks across the Black Sea, but as the centuries went on, the Ottoman empire declined and Russia started to gaze longingly at Crimea.

If you look at a map of Europe, you’ll notice that Russia’s access to the ocean has historically always been very limited. Here’s a map showing the state of things in 1750, back in Catherine the Great’s time:

Russia had access to the Baltic Sea, and Tsar Peter the Great built St. Petersburg in that little nook up at the top center of the map. But they were still bottled-up: all the countries along the Baltic could easily block Russia from reaching the Atlantic if they wanted to. And the sea around St. Petersburg freezes over in the winter, so it is not the world’s most-useful naval base. The northern coast of Russia has the same problem since it’s iced-up about half the year. And back in 1750 Russian explorers had just recently reached the Pacific: but that was 3500 miles from Moscow, which is a loooong way to go on horseback, so not very useful either. At a time when ships were the only way to travel significant distances, and other nations like Britain, France, and Spain had trade fleets and warships sailing around every corner of the map, Russia was completely boxed-in and cut off. But along the ice-free shores of the Black Sea, only a few meddling Turks and Tatars stood between Russia and the Mediterranean. 

Russia’s leaders hatched a geopolitical plan that would obsess the Tsars for 150 years, and arguably, continue to influence Soviet policy later on. Russia would try to push south, capture the areas around the Black Sea, and eventually, seize Constantinople from the heathen Turks. There was religious and cultural significance to this: Russia had adopted Orthodox Christianity due to the missionary efforts of the Byzantines, and a Byzantine princess had married into the royal line of Kyivan Rus’ back in the dark ages, so the Tsars considered themselves to be the heirs of the ancient Orthodox tradition based in Constantinople. There’s also the nice little bonus that control of Constantinople (which they planned to rename “Tsargrad”) would grant Russia access to the Mediterranean. 

Prior to the reign of Catherine the Great, Russia had no access to the Black Sea, but she pushed into that region, grabbing territory in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia. Eventually, they took over the whole area and annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783. Russia established a new naval base at Sevastopol, giving them prime access to the Black Sea for the first time ever.

Meanwhile, Britain and France were alarmed by how rapidly Turkey was declining. One more push and Russia would be in the Mediterranean, threatening the British and French empires. So, in the 1850s, these powers teamed up with Turkey against Russia in a pact known as the “unholy alliance” and launched the Crimean War. Eventually Russia lost, and in the peace treaty they had to agree to demilitarize the Black Sea coast. For now, their ambitions to capture Constantinople had to be put on ice, but they thawed them out after the treaty expired and Russia built Sevastopol up as a navy base again. The dream of taking Constantinople never really went away, and it was one of Russia’s main goals in the First World War before things went haywire and the Tsarist regime collapsed in 1917.

When the Soviet Union was established, Crimea was officially administered as part of Russia, not Ukraine, despite the geographical proximity. During Stalin’s rule, he deported the entire Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia, with many of them dying along the way. Since the fall of the USSR, some of them have moved back, but in the interim the peninsula was mostly settled by ethnic Russians and people from other parts of the USSR, many of whom had ties to the naval bases on the peninsula. 

In 1954, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. It’s a popular urban legend that Khrushchev was drunk at the time, and the official stated reason for the transfer was due to the “the territorial proximity, and the close economic and cultural ties” between Ukraine and Crimea, but at first glance this seems odd. There weren’t really “close cultural ties” with Ukraine, so why go to the trouble of doing this? One factor may have been the struggle against Ukrainian nationalists I described in a previous article. The USSR had fought a grinding war against in Western Ukraine against local nationalist guerillas that lasted well into the 1950s. By transferring a province with a large ethnic Russian population and strong Russian identity to Ukraine, it would dilute pro-independence sentiments in the country and bind Soviet Ukraine closer to the Russian center. So adding Crimea to Ukraine was probably a move to make Ukraine more Russian, not a drunken giveaway of one of Russia’s crown jewels. And if you lived in Sevastopol in 1955, it didn’t really matter that you were now part of the Ukrainian SSR instead of the Russian SSR: day-to-day life was the same.

Then, in 1991 something happened in Crimea that had a major unpredictable impact for the world. At the time, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was planning to replace the USSR with a new country: the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics. The troublesome periphery (Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and the Baltics) would be let go, the Communist Party’s monopoly on power would be dropped (hence ditching “socialist” from the name), but otherwise the other republics would stick together. Gorbachev envisioned a non-Marxist country with electoral politics and more regional autonomy, but he still wanted to retain most of the Soviet Union’s territory and power. The treaty establishing the new union was going to be signed on August 20th, and since he had been busy wrangling all the different factions into supporting it, Gorbachev went to his vacation home in Crimea for a few days of PTO on August 4th (*fax machine shudders to life*: “Thank you for your fax. I will be out of the office 8/4-8/19. Please do not contact me ever. Best, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. This message is sent from the unceded ancestral territory of the Crimean Tatars. We honor their culture and contributions to our socialist motherland, but we are not going to do anything about it.”)

Gorby was hanging out at his beach house when a bunch of KGB hardliners launched a coup against him on August 18th, placing him under house arrest, declaring a state of emergency, and refusing to let him go unless he repudiated the treaty. At the same time, they rolled tanks onto the streets of Moscow and other Soviet cities. Huge numbers of people came out to protest against the coup, which fell apart in a matter of days due to lack of support. That was the real death knell of the Soviet Union, as well as Gorbachev’s vision of a reformed USSR: all of the republics moved now towards independence, the new President of the Russian SSR, Boris Yeltsin, banned the Communist Party, and he (not Gorbachev) became the first leader of an independent Russia.

Boris Yeltsin (left, holding papers) speaking from on top of a tank during the August 1991 coup attempt. Note the Russian flag, not the Soviet flag, held by his supporters

Soviet Ukraine held a referendum in the aftermath of the coup, asking people if they wanted to become an independent country rather than remain in a union with Russia. Every province voted “yes”, but Crimea had the lowest percentage supporting independence: only 54% compared to 92% nationally. Probably if they held the vote before the coup, most people in Crimea would have rejected independence. But as it was, Crimea went along with Ukraine, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 26th, 1991.

Ukraine gained control of the Black Sea fleet based in Crimea, which was about half of the total Soviet Navy, but this caused major problems almost immediately. Most of the officers and sailors were Russians who wouldn’t swear allegiance to Ukraine, the newly independent state couldn’t afford to pay for such a massive fleet, and Russia started to cry foul that Khrushchev’s transfer of Crimea to Ukraine back in 1954 had been improper. A large Russian military force had become stranded in a foreign country overnight: it would be like if Hawaii suddenly became independent and inherited the entire US Pacific command. This was a tense, unsustainable situation, so Russia and Ukraine negotiated a settlement to divvy up the ships: Russia got most of the good ones, the sailors could choose which country they would align with, and Russia was granted base rights in Sevastopol through 2017. Ukraine mostly got the junk rustbucket ships, and couldn’t afford to maintain them anyway, so the Ukrainian navy didn’t ever amount to much. In exchange for giving up its share of the USSR’s nukes, Ukraine’s new borders (including Crimea) were accepted by Russia and NATO.

So this was the context in which Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and took it over. At the time, Ukraine’s people were starting to align with the West, and a massive protest movement forced pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from office, so Putin came in and snatched this place that has always held major significance for Russia. Putin’s troops and pro-Russian Crimeans took over the peninsula without much armed resistance from the Ukrainian government, which was largely in disarray after overthrowing Yanukovych. Russia was able to capture the entirety of the Ukrainian navy at this time and add it to their Black Sea fleet. Putin then held one of his now-famous gunpoint referendums where an implausible 97% of Crimeans voted to join Russia. Mission Accomplished.

Such has been the status quo since 2014. In the interim, Russia has built a bridge connecting Crimea to mainland Russia, and used the peninsula as a base to launch other attacks on Ukraine. However, Crimea’s usefulness as a base has been greatly diminished since the start of the 2022 war. Ukraine has used drones and missiles to sink or disable more than a third of the Black Sea fleet, including its flagship and all of Russia’s missile carriers. No major power has lost that many ships since World War II. Ukraine can easily hit the docks at Sevastopol and the bridge to Russia from their territory, and they’ve effectively blocked the Russians from operating in the western half of the Black Sea near Ukraine’s coast. Russia’s ships are trapped in the eastern Black Sea and can’t receive reinforcements from elsewhere. Just like in Tsarist times, Turkey still controls the straits at Istanbul, and they have blocked Russian access to and from the Black Sea’s only outlet. Russia does have other ports on the Black Sea in its own (pre-2014) territory, but their ships are being sunk faster than new ones can be launched. So the capture of Crimea has been a futile victory, since Ukraine, a country without a navy, has been able to terrorize the Black Sea fleet and keep it from being useful.

Russian flagship Moskva sinking after being struck by Ukrainian missiles, April 2022.

What are the prospects that Crimea could return to Ukrainian control? It’s a longshot: Russia has seen Crimea as a location of prime importance for as long as America has been a country, so they aren’t going to give it away for free. Since the Russian takeover anyone with pro-Ukrainian sentiments has been expelled or jailed, and more Russians have moved in. A restored Ukrainian administration would be perceived as a foreign occupation by the local population of 2 million Russians, which is a recipe for an insurgency. Most Russians back home consider it to be the sacred soil of the motherland, and not just because Putin says so. Even the liberal democratic Russian leader Alexei Navalny (RIP) said at the time of the takeover that the transfer of Crimea to Soviet Ukraine in 1954 had been “unfair and illegal” and that “Crimea will remain a part of Russia and will not become Ukrainian again in the foreseeable future”. Most anti-Putin Russians (who are now mainly exiles in Turkey, Thailand, and Bali) would agree with Navalny and wouldn’t want to return it to Ukraine. Russia would have to descend into total chaos, with the country and the armed forces completely disintegrating for Crimea to be easily snatched back by Ukraine. It seems like the period of 20-something years when Crimea was part of an independent Ukraine will be remembered as an unusual interlude in the history of the peninsula. 

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