Republic of Crimea (Russia)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Republic of Crimea sits on a peninsula that juts into the Black Sea, and its legal status depends entirely on who you ask. Russia calls it one of its federal republics. Ukraine calls it occupied territory. Most of the world sides with Ukraine. In the span of a few weeks in early 2014, a territory that had spent decades as a part of post-Soviet Ukraine was absorbed into the Russian Federation through a process that drew international condemnation and set off years of dispute that have not ended since. How did a parliament vote on a referendum in just days? What happened to the people who refused to take Russian citizenship? And what became of the peninsula's water, its economy, its schools? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Takeover

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  In February 2014, following the removal of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian leadership decided to pursue the return of Crimea. Armed forces without insignias, alongside pro-Russian separatists, moved across the peninsula. Within weeks Russia held effective control of the territory.

  To give the takeover a political form, on the 6th of March 2014 the Crimean parliament and the Sevastopol City Council announced a referendum. The vote was scheduled for the 16th of March, giving citizens less than two weeks to prepare. Voters were offered two options: join the Russian Federation as a federal subject, or restore the 1992 Crimean constitution and remain part of Ukraine. Keeping the existing arrangement was not on the ballot.

  On the 11th of March, both the Crimean parliament and the Sevastopol City Council issued a joint letter declaring they would unilaterally seek independence from Ukraine if the vote went in favor of joining Russia. The letter cited what it called the "Kosovo precedent." The design of that process was deliberate: it was crafted to allow Russia to argue that Crimea had acted on its own sovereign will rather than being annexed.

  According to those who organized the referendum, the results showed 96.77 percent of the 81.36 percent of Crimeans who voted were in favor of joining Russia. Most of the international community did not recognize the vote. Independent observers disputed the reported numbers. The BBC noted that most Crimean Tatars it interviewed were boycotting the ballot entirely. UN reports criticized the conditions under which the vote was held, pointing specifically to the presence of paramilitaries and unidentifiable soldiers. The European Union, Canada, Japan and the United States condemned it as illegal.

  On the 18th of March 2014, the formal annexation was concluded when the self-proclaimed Republic of Crimea signed a treaty of accession to the Russian Federation. Sevastopol was admitted separately as a federal city. A post-annexation transition period was set to run until the 1st of January 2015. The Ukrainian military began withdrawing on the 19th of March, and by the 26th of March Russia held complete military control.

• 3. Integration, Day by Day

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  The administrative absorption of Crimea into Russia began almost immediately after the formal annexation. On the 24th of March 2014, the Russian ruble entered official circulation on the peninsula, with the Ukrainian hryvnia permitted to circulate alongside it until the 1st of January 2016. Taxes and wages at budget-funded organizations, however, had to be paid in rubles from the start.

  On the 29th of March, Crimea's clocks were moved forward to Moscow time. Two days later, the Russian Foreign Ministry declared that foreign visitors to Crimea would need to obtain a Russian visa from a Russian diplomatic mission or consulate.

  On the 3rd of April, Moscow formally notified Ukraine that it was terminating the agreements covering the Russian Black Sea Fleet's use of Ukrainian territory. Under those agreements, Russia had paid Ukraine $530 million annually for the base, written off roughly $100 million of Kyiv's debt, and provided a $100 discount per 1,000 cubic meters of natural gas. With the base now inside Russian-controlled territory, the Kremlin declared those terms no longer legally applicable.

  On the 11th of April, the Crimean parliament approved a new constitution, with 88 of its 100 lawmakers voting in favor. The document declared the Republic of Crimea a democratic state within the Russian Federation and promised that some government posts would carry quotas reserved for Crimean Tatars, according to the Kommersant newspaper. That same day, a revised Russian Constitution was officially published listing the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol as federal subjects. The new constitution's text entered legal force on the 12th of April when the Krymskiye Izvestiya newspaper published it, which under the rules of legal publication made it binding law on that date.

  By the 1st of June 2014, the Ukrainian hryvnia had been phased out entirely and the ruble became Crimea's sole legal tender. Phone codes were switched from the Ukrainian to the Russian numbering system on the 7th of May 2015. By July 2015, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev declared that full integration had been achieved, a view echoed at the Russian Security Council.

• 4. Water and Walls

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  Once Ukraine lost control of Crimea in 2014, it shut off the North Crimean Canal, which had supplied 85 percent of the peninsula's freshwater from the Dnieper river. Finding replacement sources proved enormously difficult and absorbed years of effort and investment.

  The water blockade remained in place until 2022, when Russian forces seized portions of Kherson Oblast during the wider invasion of Ukraine. That territorial gain allowed Russia to forcibly reopen the canal and restore the water flow into Crimea.

  The road and rail infrastructure connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland presented a separate engineering challenge, since the peninsula shares no land border with Russia itself. Between 2014 and 2019, Russia built the Crimean Bridge across the Kerch Strait, a multibillion-dollar road-rail fixed link. Road traffic began using the bridge in 2018. Rail service for passengers followed in 2019, and freight rail began in 2020. During the wider 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the bridge became a key supply route for Russian forces. In October 2022 it was badly damaged by an explosion.

  On the 28th of December 2018, Russia completed a high-tech security fence marking the boundary between Crimea and Ukraine. The peninsula's electricity arrives via a cable running beneath the Kerch Strait; in June 2018 a complete electrical blackout struck all of Crimea before the grid company Rosseti reported it had restored power in roughly one hour. Russia also modernized the Simferopol International Airport beginning in 2017, and the new terminal opened in April 2018.

• 5. Economy Under Sanctions

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  The annexation reshaped Crimea's economy almost overnight. Russia doubled pension payments to roughly 560,000 pensioners and raised pay for about 200,000 public sector workers, though those raises were cut back in April 2015.

  By March 2015, according to Russian statistics, inflation in Crimea had reached 80 percent. Local food prices had grown approximately 2.5 times since the annexation, and the peninsula was by that point importing most of its food from Russia. In June 2015, the Economist estimated that the average salary in Crimea was about two-thirds of the average salary in Russia.

  Russian-controlled authorities nationalized what they classified as strategically important enterprises. The targets ranged from transportation and energy companies to a wine factory in Massandra. Enterprises owned by Russian citizens were nationalized with some financial reimbursement, though critics said the payments fell well below actual market value. Enterprises owned by Ukrainian citizens were expropriated without any compensation at all. PrivatBank, owned by Ihor Kolomoyskyi, and Ukrtelecom, owned by Rinat Akhmetov, were among the seized businesses. In the case of the Zalyv Shipbuilding yard, Crimean self-defense forces stormed company headquarters to press for nationalization. The Republic's head, Sergey Aksyonov, acknowledged that at least once, "employees established control of the enterprise on their own, we just helped them a little."

  On the 6th of May 2014, the National Bank of Ukraine ordered Ukrainian banks to stop operating in Crimea. The Central Bank of Russia subsequently closed all Ukrainian bank branches on the peninsula. Eight months after the formal annexation, depositors could no longer access their Ukrainian bank accounts. Russia established a Fund for the Protection of Depositors in Crimea as part of the Deposit Insurance Agency; by the 6th of November 2014 it had paid out more than $500 million to 196,400 depositors, with a cap of roughly $15,000 per account. Before the annexation, 180 banks operated in Crimea; by July 2015 only 25 remained.

  Russia's Federal Target Program projected investment of one trillion rubles, equivalent to $15.3 billion, into Crimea and Sevastopol before 2022. International sanctions drove most foreign businesses out and shrank the peninsula's once-active IT sector to only a handful of companies.

• 6. Language and Identity

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  Article 10 of the Constitution of the Republic of Crimea establishes three official languages: Russian, Ukrainian, and Crimean Tatar. In practice, the balance between them shifted sharply after 2014.

  A census conducted by occupation authorities in 2014 found that 84 percent of Crimean residents named Russian as their native language, while 7.9 percent named Crimean Tatar, 3.7 percent named Tatar, and 3.3 percent named Ukrainian. The previous census had been held more than a decade earlier, in 2001, when Crimea was still under Ukrainian control.

  By 2015, the Republic's Ministry of Education reported that 96.74 percent of primary and secondary school pupils were studying in Russian. Pupils studying in Crimean Tatar numbered 5,083 across 53 schools in 17 districts, a rise of 188 over the previous year. Only 949 pupils were studying in Ukrainian, spread across 22 schools in 13 districts.

  Education Minister Natalia Goncharova announced in mid-August 2014 that no parents of first-graders had submitted applications for Ukrainian-language instruction, and therefore no Ukrainian classes would be formed in primary schools. She did note that more than a quarter of parents at the Ukrainian gymnasium in Simferopol had requested Ukrainian-language teaching, so that school might retain Ukrainian classes. By the 10th of October 2014, Goncharova said Crimea still had 20 schools conducting all subjects in Ukrainian.

  A report published by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in the summer of 2015 stated that the Republic of Crimea appeared to be pursuing the goal of ending Ukrainian-language teaching entirely, applying pressure on school administrators, teachers, parents, and children to achieve that outcome.

• 7. Human Rights and Crimean Tatars

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  United Nations monitors who were present in Crimea from the 2nd of April to the 6th of May 2014 reported serious concerns. Journalists and activists who had opposed the referendum were harassed and abducted. Crimeans who had not applied for Russian citizenship faced intimidation. Russia stated that it did not support the deployment of human rights monitors on the peninsula.

  Human Rights Watch, in a November 2014 report, stated that the de facto authorities had restricted free expression, limited peaceful assembly, and harassed people who opposed Russia's actions. The report recorded 15 people who had gone missing since March 2014; Ukrainian authorities put the number at 21. Sergey Aksyonov pledged to investigate the disappearances and met regularly with parents of the missing, though those parents and human rights organizations complained that frequent rotation of investigative personnel was damaging the inquiries.

  The Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, the community's representative council, came under particular pressure. On the 16th of September 2014, the Russian Federal Security Service reportedly seized control of the building where the Mejlis held its sessions and searched the offices of the Avdet newspaper, which was based in the same building. Several Mejlis members had their homes searched. Senior Crimean Tatar figures were banned from re-entering Crimea for five years.

  In February 2016, human rights defender Emir-Usein Kuku was arrested and accused of membership in Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist organization he denied any connection to. Amnesty International called for his immediate release. In May 2018, Server Mustafayev, founder and coordinator of the human rights movement Crimean Solidarity, was imprisoned on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization. Both Amnesty International and Front Line Defenders demanded his release.

  Crimeans who refused Russian citizenship were barred from holding government or municipal jobs. By July 2015-20,000 Crimeans had renounced their Ukrainian citizenship. From the time of annexation through October 2016, more than 8,800 Crimean residents obtained Ukrainian passports.

• 8. International Standing

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  On the 27th of March 2014, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a non-binding resolution affirming that the referendum was invalid and reaffirming Ukraine's territorial integrity. The vote was 100 to 11 in favor of the resolution, with 58 abstentions and 24 countries absent. Voting in support included Australia, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with 89 other countries. Russia voted against, joined by Armenia, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. China, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Brazil were among those that abstained. Israel was listed as absent. Reuters reported that unnamed UN diplomats said the Russian delegation had threatened punitive action against certain Eastern European and Central Asian states if they supported the resolution.

  Among the early recognitions of the referendum, Armenia's acknowledgment on the 21st of March 2014 prompted Ukraine to recall its ambassador. The unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic recognized the referendum on the 17th of March. On the 22nd of March, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told a visiting U.S. delegation that he recognized and supported the vote. On the 27th of March, Nicaragua unconditionally recognized Crimea's incorporation into Russia. Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus stated on the 23rd of March that Crimea was de facto part of Russia, though Belarus did not officially recognize Russia's claim until November 2021.

  The United States, the European Union, and Australia stated that they would not issue visas to Crimean residents carrying Russian passports. Russian media reported, however, that some Schengen Area member states had in practice issued visas to Crimeans holding Russian documents.

  Ukraine launched the Crimea Platform in 2021, a diplomatic initiative aimed at protecting the rights of residents and working toward reversing the annexation. Russia, meanwhile, recorded that 205,559 Russians had moved to Crimea between 2014 and 2021, according to the Office of the Federal State Statistics Service. Ukrainian officials and the Crimean Human Rights Group suggested the real number of migrants could be many times higher.