Crimea’s Return to Russian Mainland

Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

The Crimean Peninsula has been part of Russia for centuries, settled mainly by ethnic Russians after its capture by the Tsarist Empire from Ottoman Turkish forces in 1774.

For that reason, even when the Soviet Union was formed as a nominal federation, the Crimean Peninsula was included in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, rather than in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic next door.

Yet in February 1954, perhaps for reasons of territorial proximity, then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev handed it to Ukraine. Perhaps Khrushchev also saw it as a way of fortifying and perpetuating Soviet control over its second most populous republic.

In the 1950s, the population of Crimea, then approximately 1.1 million, was roughly 75 per cent ethnic Russian and 25 per cent Ukrainian. 

Cultural ties were much stronger overall with Russia than with Ukraine, and Crimea was the site of major military and naval bases.

And even though Crimea is contiguous with southern Ukraine via the Isthmus of Perekop, the large eastern Kerch region of Crimea is very close to Russia across the Sea of Azov. 

So the transfer made little sense. But back then, internal borders within a Communist state like the USSR didn’t much matter. Now they do – because when the USSR was dissolved in 1991, Crimea remained Ukrainian.

This remained the case until President Vladimir Putin reunited the peninsula with the Russian Federation in February 2014, after claiming that its ethnic Russians were threatened by the country’s pro-Western revolution. 

However, it remained an enclave separated from Russia proper by Ukraine or water. That too has now changed.

On May 15, Putin opened a 19-kilometre four-lane bridge directly linking Russia to Crimea across the Kerch Strait that connects the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and separates the Kerch Peninsula of Crimea in the west from the Taman Peninsula of Russia’s Krasnodar Krai (territory) in the east. 

The bridge, which will carry both road and rail traffic, is the longest in the country and one of the largest in Europe. It was built at a cost of $4 billion. 

About 40,000 passenger cars a day will be able to cross the bridge, drastically reducing the time it takes Russians to reach Crimea, which until now was accessible from Russia only by plane or ferry. It also lifted the sense of isolation Crimeans have felt since Ukraine cut off railroad links and made the border crossing difficult.

Putin called the construction “a remarkable result that makes Crimea and legendary Sevastopol even stronger and all of us closer to each other.”

Not surprisingly, Ukraine declared the bridge “illegal,” while the European Union maintained that it “constitutes another violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by Russia.” 

However, to steal a phrase from the Palestinians, Putin has exercised Russia’s “right of return.” Despite Ukraine’s protests, it is now hard to imagine Russia’s push into Crimea being reversed.