This is the script for my video posted on August 27, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
Crimea has been a focal point of the Ukraine war since Russia seized and annexed it in 2014. But why does Russia care so much about Crimea to begin with?
Crimea has repeatedly traded hands throughout its history, from the Greeks in the 6th century BCE to the Scythians, the Bosporan Kingdom, the Goths, the Byzantines, and the Genoese with their medieval trading colonies.
In the 15th century, the Giray dynasty of the Golden Horde formed a new Crimean Khanate that became an Ottoman vassal in 1478, though its khans kept broad autonomy right up to the late 18th century. Its largely Turkic Muslim population, mixed with the peoples already there, became the Crimean Tatars who still live there today.
In 1774, the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca ended a war between the Russian Empire and the Ottomans, and it declared the Khanate independent of Ottoman rule, a stepping stone to Russian control, while also giving Russia new footholds on the Black Sea.
In 1783, Catherine the Great formally annexed the region as a new province and founded a naval base at Sevastopol as part of her broader expansion of “New Russia.” Land seizures soon drove waves of Tatars out to Ottoman lands.
But in 1853, Russia wanted to expand its territory into Ottoman lands to gain control of the Black Sea and its shipping routes. Combined with a dispute over holy sites in Palestine, which were controlled by Ottomans, and French and British fears that Russian expansion would ruin the balance of power in Europe, this kicked off the Crimean War.
The Ottoman Empire, France, Britain, and Sardinia came together against Russia to besiege Sevastopol. They carried out an 11-month siege and ultimately stormed the city's southern side, forcing the Russians to scuttle their fleet and withdraw across the harbor, and in 1856 the war ended with the Treaty of Paris, which demilitarized the Black Sea and humiliated the Russians.
As the Bolsheviks consolidated power in the late 1910s, Crimea became the last White stronghold in European Russia, but it fell to the Red Army in 1920, and the following year the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, or ASSR, came into being.
Sevastopol became incredibly important during WWII. The Germans knew that they would never control Crimea without holding the port, and despite a heroic Soviet defense, German forces took it in 1942.
When the Soviets finally took it back in 1944, Stalin ordered the deportation of Crimean Tatars yet again on the pretext that they had allegedly collaborated with the Germans. In the end, over 230k people were rounded up, around 200k of them Tatars, and shipped in cattle cars to Uzbekistan, the Urals, and beyond. The death toll is unresolved, ranging from 30k in Soviet records to almost 110k in surveys by Tatar activists.
De-Tatarization efforts followed, with the Soviets renaming towns, razing mosques and cemeteries, and burning Tatar books. This permanently altered Crimea’s demographics because it enabled the Russian population to grow while Tatars were not allowed to return until Perestroika in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, in 1954, Crimea was transferred from the Russian Soviet Federative Soviet Republic to the Ukrainian SSR through a constitutional amendment. The decree’s stated reason was that Crimea’s connection to Ukraine was integral to its economy and that the two shared close cultural ties.
But the reality is that Crimea was only physically contiguous with Ukraine and not Russia, that it was already wired into Ukraine's economy and infrastructure, and that Nikita Khrushchev, then the Communist Party’s First Secretary, saw it as an opportunity to consolidate power with Ukrainian party elites.
Today, Russian legal scholars argue that the Presidium that had transferred Crimea had gone outside the bounds of its constitutional authority, making the transfer unlawful. But the 1954 law and constitutional amendments completed a lawful procedure under Soviet norms, which is to say that Russia is simply attempting to invalidate an action they don’t like.
In 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing, a referendum saw 93% of voters support restoring Crimea as an autonomous republic inside the Soviet Union, a peer of Ukraine. But another referendum later that year across all of Ukraine had 90% of the republic favor independence, including 54% of the predominantly Russian people of Crimea, and ultimately Ukraine and Crimea abandoned the Soviet Union together.
Under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Ukraine agreed to hand over the roughly 1900 strategic nuclear warheads on its soil in exchange for Russia, the US, and the UK respecting Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, and existing borders, as well as refraining from the threat or use of force or economic coercion. France and China gave similar assurances separately, though unfortunately none of this was binding.
Ukraine abolished the Crimean presidency and brought them fully into their fold in 1995 as the country continued to negotiate a new normal with Russia. The 1997 Partition Treaty split the Crimean fleet 50/50 on paper, but Ukraine sold most of its share back for cash, leaving Russia with about 82% of the ships. Ukraine kept sovereignty over Sevastopol while leasing the main base to Russia for 20 years.
The 2010 Kharkiv Accords extended the Sevastopol port lease from 2017 to 2042. But in 2014, this was made irrelevant. Immediately after the Euromaidan mass protests and the political crisis in Ukraine that caused Russia-backed President Viktor Yanukovych to flee, unmarked Russian troops entered Crimea, seized its airports and other key sites, took control of the Crimean Supreme Council, and installed a fringe pro-Russia politician as Prime Minister. A sham referendum followed that claimed 97% of Crimeans wanted to join Russia.
So why did Russia want Crimea back so much, other than just taking back territory it once controlled, especially when it already had a long-term lease for the port of Sevastopol? Well, first off, it was worried that the Maidan Revolution would shift dynamics against them. Russia feared that the new pro-Western government would terminate the lease early or would allow NATO to establish a presence at Sevastopol, an ice-free deep-water port that has no real equivalent available to Russia on the Black Sea.
The annexation also gave Putin a huge boost in domestic approval. It stoked patriotic sentiment, with the government framing the takeover as the recovery of ancestral land and a correction of historical grievances.
And in retrospect, they were likely already considering that not controlling Crimea would make an invasion of Ukraine far more difficult. After taking over, Russia transformed the entire peninsula into a fortress and a strategic base to project power into Ukraine, despite Crimea’s vulnerability. Without water from Ukraine, Crimea’s agricultural industry simply can’t function, and the peninsula is reliant on a single bridge across the Kerch Strait that Ukraine has repeatedly damaged.
But in 2020, Putin pushed for changes to the Russian constitution that legally bar Crimea from leaving, and losing it would be so deeply embarrassing to Putin that it is close to politically unthinkable for him to concede it.
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