Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

This combination of knock-on effects of the invasion led to an improvised annexation operation. In late February, the Crimean authorities, defying Kyiv, called a referendum on greater autonomy, to be held in May. Within less than a week, the date was moved forward twice and the question on the ballot changed. Voters were now asked whether they preferred to join Russia or remain part of Ukraine with enhanced prerogatives. While Putin had publicly reaffirmed Ukraine’s territorial integrity as late as 4 March, within days the forces unleashed by the invasion left him with a choice of capitulation or annexation.[36]

In a hastily organised plebiscite conducted on 16 March with Russian special forces on guard near ballot stations, 97% of voters allegedly supported the option to join Russia, a result so preposterously lopsided as to further discredit the referendum, which was held in flagrant violation of the Ukrainian constitution. Moscow then moved quickly to incorporate the peninsula into Russia’s federal system. Obama declared that the referendum would ‘never be recognized by the United States and the international community’, a statement that echoed widespread sentiment in the West.[37]

On 18 March, Putin delivered a blistering speech before a gathering of parliamentarians and political luminaries to announce Crimea’s ‘reunification’ with Russia. He argued that the Soviet government’s transfer of the peninsula to Ukrainian jurisdiction in 1954 had been illegal and arbitrary. In 1991, when Crimea became part of independent Ukraine, ‘Russia felt that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered’. Russia, he said, had ‘hung its head and resigned itself to this situation, swallowing its pride. Our country was going through such hard times then that it was incapable of protecting its interests. However, the people could not reconcile themselves to this outrageous historical injustice.’ For years, the Russian government ignored their pleas. But, he said, ‘everything has its limits’. After ‘nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites’, with approval from the West, took power during the ‘coup’ in Kyiv, Russia had to act:

In the case of Ukraine, our Western partners crossed the line, conducting themselves crudely, irresponsibly and unprofessionally. After all, they were fully aware that millions of Russians live in Ukraine and Crimea. They must have lost all their political instincts and even common sense not to foresee the consequences of their actions. Russia was pushed to a point beyond which it could no longer retreat. If you compress a spring as tightly as possible, eventually it will snap back hard. You must always remember that.

Putin then launched into a diatribe against Western policies since the end of the Cold War, particularly the approach toward Russia and its neighbourhood:

They have deceived us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed us before faits accomplis. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the east, as well as with the deployment of military infrastructure near our borders. They kept telling us the same thing: ‘Well, this does not concern you.’ Easy for them to say…. They are constantly trying to force us into a corner because we have independent policies, because we stand up for ourselves, because we call things like we see them and do not engage in hypocrisy.[38]

The Russian president had thrown down a gauntlet. Within a week, the ink was dry on the legal formalities of the annexation and all armed forces still loyal to Ukraine had left the peninsula (as many as two-thirds, beginning with the commander of the Ukrainian fleet there, defected to Russia).[39] In one fell swoop, Russia had rewritten the rules of the regional contestation, casting doubt on its broader relationship with the West and ties with its neighbours.