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What’s it Like in Crimea Now?
You don’t want to be in Crimea in light of Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, especially if you have the audacity to speak your mind.
Many critics of the West will point to the weak economy in the Crimean peninsula and suggest that, overall, it has been in Crimea’s best interest to belong to Russia.
I’m not so persuaded, especially in light of the sanctions on Russia. In this post, I wanted to briefly highlight the economy of Crimea and point to reasons why Russians might consider Crimea more of a burden than gain in the coming years.
As I hinted at above, political dissent in Crimea is heavily frowned upon as of its annexation in 2014. In fact, according to the reporter, Anastasiia Lapatina, Crimea is now more heavily surveilled than Russia itself. As someone who has extensively covered the region since her time previously at Kyiv Post and now Kyiv Independent, the source is as trustworthy as it can get.
As I mentioned in some of my other posts, Crimean Tatars have been persecuted by Russians because of their dissent. That’s why more than 140,000 Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians have left the peninsula from 2014 to 2020.
The representative body of Crimean Tatars in the region, the Mejlis, have even been dubbed an extremist organization by the Russians, because of the threat they…
