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What Happened to Crimea?
A Brief Overview of the Crimean Annexation
Before Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, any serious threat to undermine post-Soviet territory from Russia was deemed unlikely.
Political analysts, world leaders, and strategists alike, therefore, found the developments in Crimea surprising. Since then, we do not know how far Putin will go to expand his empire … and for how long.
In order to understand where Crimea is today, we should briefly look at why Putin and pro-Russian separatists legitimize Crimea’s separation from Ukraine. Politically, Crimea has had a history of separatism. Former president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of ‘Perestroika’ (“Restructuring”) and ‘Glasnost’ (“Openness”) helped establish localized governments and separatist movements in the Soviet Union.
By 1991, 93 percent of Crimeans sought independence and autonomy from the USSR, naming themselves the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Paradoxically, at the fall of the USSR, many Crimean supporters of autonomy did not favor the independence of Ukraine.
In fact, at the time only half of Crimeans supported Ukrainian independence, whereas in Ukraine, 91 percent did. In comparison, the March 2014 referendum reportedly saw an 83 percent turnout, with 96.7 percent of the vote…
