Revisiting the original loss: Crimea

A Russian flag flies over homes in Sevastopol Crimea. Russia’s occupation of the Ukrainian peninsula began in 2014 and has made great efforts to integrate Crimea into its political, economic and legal system. Photo: Alexey Pavlishak / Shutterstock

However, the brutal full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has shifted the attention of the world to Kharkiv, Mariupol, Chernihiv, Bucha, and other cities. And understandably so. Media and civil society in the West hold an ethical and moral responsibility to prioritise calling out the atrocities in all of those places. Yet, one must not forget the instrumental role of Crimea in the unfolding Russian military attack on Ukraine, in its early operations in the south, as a launch site for missile attacks throughout Ukraine’s mainland, and in the larger context as a key enabler of Russia’s logistics and security goals.

Russia’s first operation

Ironically, as I was writing these lines in July, Crimea and the adjacent Kherson region were the only parts of Ukraine where residents did not need to check their phones for alerts of possible missile attacks. The situation developed rapidly in August, with a number of military targets in Crimea having been hit, which generated heavy clouds of smoke in the otherwise idyllic coastal landscape. In the broader sense, the peninsula is hardly a safe haven at the moment, as no other area under Russian control has been as heavily militarised in such a short span of time. Currently, Crimea is used by the Russian military in numerous ways, most prominently as the platzdarm or lodgement of the southern axis of Russian troop activities. This ultimately enabled their blitzkrieg on Kherson, Berdyansk and Melitopol.

The most illustrative effect of this advance culminated in the gruesome encircling of Mariupol, as Russian troops moved both from the west out of Crimea and the east, coming from the territory of the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic”. The Crimean road and railway bridge – a key image of Russian propaganda which has already featured as a symbolic protagonist in state-funded films – became fully operational by 2019-20 and was an infrastructural centrepiece of the southern axis. The transport infrastructure on the peninsula proper has been refocused on supporting the movement of troops, ammunition and other equipment. The healthcare facilities in Crimea have taken on a new role of treating wounded soldiers. Simultaneously, Sevastopol became a vital missile launch site, in addition to its role as the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet. This enabled the horror of Russian military attacks on civilians all around Ukraine. One can recall the devastating missile attack on Vinnytsia on July 14th, which killed at least 26 people (and counting). The attack was launched by the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

To understand the peninsula’s role and how we got here, it is important to take a few steps back to 2014. Crimea has been occupied for over eight years now. And the progressive establishment of Russian control over the peninsula contains a number of lessons not yet learnt about Russia’s political strategy in the more recently occupied territories.

According to international law, an armed conflict exists between two states in the event of the military occupation of a territory of one of those states by the other, regardless of the presence of armed hostilities. To put it simply, Ukraine and Russia have been at war with each other since the end of February 2014. This was Russia’s first military operation in Ukraine, the success of which – together with the insufficient response of the West – fuelled the further expansion of the war to Donbas and, ultimately, the 2022 invasion.

On February 24th, both the general public in Ukraine and a wider international audience were shocked by the speed with which the Russian army crossed the administrative border between Crimea and mainland Ukraine and established control over the city of Kherson by early March. One can imagine that the sheer speed of the troop movements into the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions is how Vladimir Putin imagined the takeover of Kyiv and Kharkiv. Simultaneously, Russia moved its troops from the north through Belarus and from the east through Russia proper and Donbas. Would the swift occupation of Kherson, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Nova Kahovka, and the nuclear plant at Enerhodar have been possible if Crimea had not been occupied and progressively militarised for eight years? Evidently, no, or at least Russia would need to deploy a much larger force.

Crimea enabled a southern front for Russia’s offensive. If one looks at the map of Ukraine, it is quite apparent that Kherson is hundreds of kilometres away from the eastern border with Russia, way inland in Ukrainian territory. If Russian troops had to move by land from the east of Ukraine, they would have needed to take over – or at least bypass and effectively besiege – major towns in previously unoccupied parts of the Donetsk region. They would also have to move across the full width of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions before reaching the city of Kherson, not to mention Mykolaiv further west. The distance between Rostov-on-Don and Kherson is 603 kilometres, just 100 kilometres greater than the distance between Amsterdam and Paris (516 km). In comparison, Armyansk in the north of Crimea is 131 km away from Kherson. If Crimea had not been occupied and Russia had still wanted to strike from the south of Ukraine, it would, in most likelihood, have needed to conduct an amphibious operation with landing troops in the peninsula, moving them north.

Story of the occupation

However, let us move away from these hypotheticals for a minute and look over the story of the occupation of Crimea. In 2014, Russia made great efforts to integrate the peninsula into its political, economic and legal system. Arguably, one needs to browse the pages of history all the way back to the Second World War to find a comparable attempt at the swift and full absorption of an occupied territory. By the end of 2014, the Russian rouble had replaced the hryvnia as currency and all Ukrainian laws had been swapped for Russian legislation. This includes criminal laws, which in itself is a violation of international humanitarian law.

One immediate consequence of Russia’s takeover was the rampant campaign to issue Russian passports to local residents. Under international law, the aggressive “passportisation” policy amounts to compelling the inhabitants of an occupied territory to swear allegiance to a hostile power. This infringes the 1907 Hague Regulations. A sceptic would say that this must have been to a large extent a voluntary process, with local supporters of occupation backing this passportisation effort. Yet, the reality of the process was that holding a Russian passport became inextricably linked to access to essential rights and services in Crimea and, eventually, to the very possibility of living in Crimea without risking deportation as a “foreigner”.

Furthermore, the logic of the process was twisted. All residents of Crimea were automatically recognised as Russian citizens unless they explicitly rejected the new citizenship by going through a burdensome bureaucratic procedure. The real opportunity for rejecting Russian citizenship was minuscule. The relevant administrative centres opened on April 9th 2014, and the procedure had to be completed by April 18th. After that narrow period had ended, the person would have to go through an even more complicated process of renouncing Russian citizenship on general terms. Consequently, as reported by the United Nations, only four per cent of the residents of Crimea did not have Russian citizenship as of May 2015, a year after the occupation began.

In practice, most Crimean residents acquired the “red passport” or ausweis – local jargon for the maroon-coloured Russian document and a shrewd reference to the German occupation of Ukraine during the Second World War – but kept their blue Ukrainian passport. The visa-free regime between the EU and Ukraine, achieved in 2017, further spurred a natural interest among Crimean residents to receive new biometric Ukrainian passports. Ukraine adopted a smart policy of encouraging access to the new documents by establishing additional “centres of administrative services” in the Kherson region, with the idea that residents of Crimea could cross the administrative boundary line between Crimea and the mainland to apply for the passports. And they came en masse.

Although the process was often marked by delay and hiccups, Crimean residents gradually received the possibility to exercise other rights in mainland Ukraine. For example, the government started a special scholarship programme for high school graduates from the peninsula to study at certain universities across the country. Residents of Crimea could also exercise their right to vote in Ukrainian elections in the Kherson oblast. These smart policies helped maintain social ties with the peninsula and laid the groundwork for any future de-occupation and reintegration processes.

Submission and assimilation

Russia’s passportisation was followed by several processes of population movement. The UN estimated that 205,541 civilians from Russia had obtained a registered address in Crimea by 2020, which at the time represented 8.7 per cent of the overall population. These relocations are encouraged by various policies, including the appointments of judges, law enforcement and other officials to the peninsula alongside relocation support for their families. All key positions of the siloviki – members of the country’s vast security services – were appointed from all over Russia. Human rights NGOs reported that academic and healthcare personnel also received incentives to move to Crimea. It is also highly unlikely that every Russian who moves to Crimea bothers to go through the hassle of changing their propiska or registered address. This means that many newcomers cannot be traced in the statistics. One cannot help but see these processes as a manifestation of the Russian version of Lebensraum.

Simultaneously, courts in Crimea expel people who do not have “residence rights”. This is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, since residents of an occupied territory are “protected persons” under international law. This is normally coupled with bans on re-entry “into Russia”, which de facto denies the right to return to the occupied peninsula. The hostile environment against the manifestation of any form of pro-Ukrainian voice or identity, as well as intolerance towards independent journalists, human rights activists, LGBTQ+ people, and different religious groups, compelled many to relocate to mainland Ukraine in order to avoid persecution. In a nutshell, the cumulative effect of these policies was to achieve submission and assimilation, with a simultaneous process of neo-colonisation through the relocation of people from Russia and squeezing out of any critics of occupation. Crimean Tatars, with their painful history of Stalinist mass deportation to Central Asia, stayed in spite of the crackdown on their self-governance institutions, such as the Mejlis. Members of this group have faced criminal prosecution under various categories of charges. Needless to say, the situation of the Crimean Tatars is unique in this sense and there is hardly a comparable example in all of the territories of Ukraine occupied since February this year.

Forced conscription and militarisation

We are naturally moving to the issue that is most pertinent in the context of the current cycle of Russian aggression: the forced conscription of Crimean residents into the Russian Federation’s armed forces. Of course, this is a grave violation of international humanitarian law. Curiously, the occupying power allowed one full year of “transition period” before it started conscripting young men from the peninsula into its army. This can be explained by the fact that military drafts only apply to Russian citizens, meaning that the occupying authorities needed to achieve decent results with their passportisation programme before moving further. Starting from 2015, however, Russia conscripted, on average, 2,500 young men per military draft. This occurs twice a year in spring and autumn.

Men were often drafted right after they had finished their studies and a portion of them were then sent across the Kerch Strait and allocated to various military bases in Russia. Crimean men of conscription age faced restrictions on their freedom of movement, as going to mainland Ukraine necessitated crossing one of three Russia-controlled checkpoints, which Moscow considers to be its “state border”. This frontier is guarded with diligence by a special border department of the FSB, a blast from the past when the Soviet borders were guarded by NKVD and then KGB-subordinated units. To add insult to injury, those who tried to ignore the summons to the draft commissions faced criminal prosecution, which culminated in guilty verdicts for “draft evasion”.

Conscription is a clear example of the risks that Russian passports carry for anyone who might receive them in the other occupied territories of Ukraine. Forced recruitment of civilians through the proxy hands of the so-called “republics” in the east of Ukraine has been even more brutal than in Crimea. The UN reported on the practice of sending local men to the front lines just a few days after their recruitment.

In fact, if we zoom out a little, forced conscription of local men in Crimea is only one cog in the machinery of the peninsula’s militarisation. Over the years, Russia has increased the presence of weapons systems, military infrastructure, personnel, and offensive capabilities in a broader sense. This was flagged as a security concern for the entire Black Sea region in UN resolution 73/194 and most recently in resolution 76/70 in December 2021. One might recall the naval incident on November 25th 2018, when the Russian fleet used force against three Ukrainian vessels and detained their crews for almost a year. That event triggered a declaration of martial law in Ukraine at the time. In fact, this more well-known confrontation had been preceded by a series of smaller incidents involving fishing crews from the mainland and Crimea. These culminated in a semi-official exchange of captured fishermen. Moscow has clearly tried to assert its dominance over the Black and Azov Seas for years. It used every opportunity to escalate tensions, test the waters, and potentially create a casus belli.

Democratic resistance

Conscription and militarisation occur against the backdrop of draconian limitations on access to information and rampant militaristic propaganda, including indoctrination in schools. Since the full-scale invasion, Russia has passed several new laws, further curtailing free speech by punishing any beliefs that “discredit the Russian Federation armed forces”. At the same time, the state has also banned “fake news” about the “performance of functions by state authorities” outside the country. An unprecedented crackdown – even for Russia – on media outlets, human rights NGOs and social media turned the information space into a burnt field, to use a Russian metaphor.

All these laws are fully enforced in Crimea, with some incidents borderline Orwellian. In one example, documented by the UN, a 70-year-old woman was convicted of discrediting the Russian armed forces for bringing flowers and a handmade “No to war” sign on a blue and yellow paperboard to the Taras Shevchenko monument in Simferopol to commemorate the anniversary of his birth on March 9th. Can we find a more compelling warning sign for what awaits other areas of Ukraine if Russia establishes its “administrations” there?

In an interview on July 20th this year, the so-called head of Crimea, Serhii Aksyonov, stated that the process of integration and adaptation in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions [with Russia] will be similar to the process in Crimea. Of course, he can be labelled as a minor player in Russian propaganda, aiming to “lift spirits” amidst the successes of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south. This has put the Russian military on the back foot. Yet, Aksyonov is not alone in discussing a so-called referendum in Kherson on joining Russia, even as the date for this vote keeps being pushed back.

The author of this humble piece certainly shares the view that Ukraine will prevail in this bloody war. The circumstances and the cost of the victory, however, remain uncertain. In that sense, reminding ourselves of what can happen if Russia’s administrative and legislative – and not only military – grip over other areas of Ukraine is firmly established provides an additional argument against any false appeasement strategies, including trade-offs for territories. As the example of Crimea shows, Russia will not only arm the newly gained frontline territories to the teeth, but it will also unwaveringly impose its entire legal and political system on millions of civilians.

We must never forget that unlike in the time of the Russian Empire, when the south and east of Ukraine were scarcely inhabited before industrialisation, the current population centre is focused on the densely populated areas in and around Donbas. In fact, the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv oblasts together are home to over ten million people, even by a conservative estimate. Ukraine is fighting for its people, first and foremost. We must spare these millions of people the prospect of imposed Russian citizenship, deportations, military enlistment, indoctrination in schools, the stifling of dissent and the persecution of free speech. To put it simply, Ukraine strives to fight back against a tangible risk of neo-colonisation in relation to these territories. We must make sure that Ukraine succeeds.

Maksym Popovych is a human rights lawyer from Ukraine. He specialises in the situation of human rights and international humanitarian law violations in the territories of Ukraine occupied by the Russian Federation.

annexation of Crimea, Crimea, Russia, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine