Where the Iron Crosses Grow

Ukraine’s claim to the Crimea was based strictly upon Khrushchev’s 1954 executive decision, not upon historical claims or demographics. In 2001, the bulk of the population in the Crimea were ethnic Russians with little love for the government in Kiev, and ethnic Ukrainians comprised less than a quarter of the region’s population. The Crimean Tatars, numbering some 243,000, were in an even worse position. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the remaining Tatars to return to the Crimea in 1989, but it was soon evident that they would be reduced to a despised minority. After returning to the Crimea, the Tatars found that all their former land had been appropriated by the state and given to others, often Red Army veterans or local Communist Party bureaucrats, leaving them to settle as squatters on the outskirts of Simferopol and Bakhchysaray. Local officials did everything they could to prevent returning Crimean Tatars from acquiring land or employment.¹

Despite the appearance of peaceful coexistence between Russia and the Ukraine, many Russians never reconciled themselves to the loss of the Crimea and the former empire, and with the ascendancy of Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000, Russian irredentist aspirations found their champion. In the mindset of Putin – a hardcore Chekist – and his Russian nationalist supporters, the Red Army’s liberation of the Crimea in May 1944 has been tarnished by the zeal of Ukrainian nationalists to lay claim over land bought and paid for with Russian blood. Initially, Putin hoped to reduce Ukraine to a vassal state by using the threat of natural-gas embargoes to weaken its economy, and by providing assistance to former communists such as Viktor Yanukovych, who became Ukraine’s prime minister in 2002. Yanukovych favored close ties with Russia, and sought to keep Ukraine away from membership of NATO. When Yanukovych was elected president in 2010, he hurried to sign the Kharkov Accord with Russia, which extended the lease on the Sevastopol naval base until 2042. Putin could live with an independent Ukraine as long as it was run by a compliant pro-Russian such as Yanukovych, but everything changed when the Ukrainian people rose against his corrupt regime and the parliament deposed him on February 22, 2014. Yanukovych fled to Russian territory.

Without an ally in Kiev, Russia could no longer count on Ukraine staying out of NATO or maintaining access to Sevastopol. Putin suddenly began claiming that the Crimea was never really integrated into the country and should never have been part of an independent Ukraine – marking Khrushchev’s gesture as a historic mistake.² He also regarded the political vacuum in Kiev as an excellent opportunity to correct this mistake. Only five days after Yanukovych was deposed in Kiev, ethnic Russian agitators – acting on Moscow’s behest – seized control of the provincial capital of Simferopol. Once the locals had seized a base of operations, the first Russian airborne and Spetsnaz troops – without national markings – began entering the Crimea in order to reinforce the local Russian groups. The 18,000 Ukrainian troops stationed in the Crimea were caught completely by surprise and were quickly surrounded in their garrisons; lacking orders from the interim government in Kiev, they passively watched as Russian forces occupied the entire peninsula. Within three weeks, Russian forces were able to starve out the Ukrainian garrisons in the Crimea and seize the bulk of the Ukrainian Navy, with minimal bloodshed, but provoking a crisis with the West. On March 16, 2014, the new pro-Russian regime in Simferopol declared its independence from Ukraine, and on the next day formally joined with Russia. Two days later, the new Russian regime in Simferopol took immediate steps to target the remaining Crimean Tatars for ethnic cleansing, as their removal is a necessary prerequisite to stabilize the Russian claim to the region.³ In short order, Russian-sponsored violence encouraged many Crimean Tatars to begin relocating to the Ukraine or other countries. Once again, Russian territorial acquisition has been accompanied by ruthless ethnic cleansing.