Sevastopol

• 1. Introduction

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  Sevastopol sits at the southwestern tip of the Crimean peninsula, and for more than two centuries it has never stopped being fought over. The city was founded in June 1783 as a naval base, named by Catherine the Great from the Greek for 'venerable city,' and from that founding moment it carried an outsized weight. It anchored Russia's Black Sea Fleet. It withstood a German siege lasting 250 days. It spent decades locked behind the walls of a closed Soviet city. Then in 2014, it became the flashpoint of a crisis that the United Nations Security Council called unprecedented. What is it about this one port city that keeps drawing the world's attention? The answers lie in its geography, its long military memory, and the unresolved question of who it actually belongs to.

• 2. A City Named for an Empress

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  In February 1784, Catherine the Great ordered her favourite military governor, Grigory Potyomkin, to build a fortress on the western shore of Southern Bay and call it Sevastopol. The name she chose was a compound of two Greek words: sebastós, meaning 'venerable,' and pólis, meaning 'city.' Sebastós was the traditional Greek equivalent of the Roman title Augustus, first given to the emperor who bore that name and then passed to every Roman emperor after him. Naming the city after the imperial title was almost certainly a nod to Catherine herself, who held the equivalent Roman rank of Augusta. She visited in 1787, accompanied by Joseph II, the Emperor of Austria, and other foreign dignitaries, touring a city that was still taking shape.

  The man who actually laid the groundwork was Rear Admiral Thomas MacKenzie, a native Scot in Russian service known locally as Foma Fomich Makenzi. He founded the settlement in June 1783 under the older name Akhtiar, which means White Cliff in Crimean Tatar. Five years before that, Alexander Suvorov had ordered earthworks along the harbour and stationed Russian troops there; MacKenzie built on what Suvorov had prepared. Captain Fyodor Ushakov, named commander of the port and of the Black Sea squadron in 1788, handled the practical work of construction. The name itself was not even stable in the early decades. In 1797 Emperor Paul I renamed the city Akhtiar again. Only on the 29th of April (the 10th of May by the new calendar) 1826 did the Senate permanently restore the name Sevastopol.

  The spelling of that name caused its own confusion in the West. The letter 'V' in the Cyrillic 'Севасто́поль' resembles the Western letter 'B,' which led British and other Western writers to spell the city's name Sebastopol for generations. The Economist used that older form for many years. The 'V' spelling eventually became standard in English, but the older form still appears in some publications and remains recognisable to anyone who learned the city's name during the Crimean War era.

• 3. Siege, Treaty, and Naval Power

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  From 1853 to 1856, the Crimean War turned Sevastopol into the defining battlefield of the century for Russia. Allied commanders, after a minor skirmish at Köstence (modern Constanta), fixed on Sevastopol as Russia's primary naval target in the Black Sea. Allied forces landed on the peninsula in September 1854 and defeated the Russians at the Battle of the Alma on the 20th of September. A Russian counterattack at Balaclava on the 25th of October was repulsed, but it seriously depleted British forces. A second counterattack at Inkerman in November ended in stalemate. The war then settled into a long siege under brutal conditions on both sides.

  The city held for eleven months before the French assault on Fort Malakoff broke the deadlock. Isolated and facing the prospect of further Western invasion, Russia agreed to peace in March 1856. The Treaty of Paris, signed on the 30th of March 1856, contained a provision that directly crippled Russia's naval ambitions: it forbade Russia from basing warships in the Black Sea at all. That restriction hampered Russia during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, and the painful experience of fighting without a proper Black Sea fleet drove Russia to rebuild its naval strength in the region as soon as the diplomatic situation allowed.

  The loss at Sevastopol marked Russian strategic thinking for generations. The city was not just a base; it was proof that losing control of the Black Sea had direct military consequences at home. By the time the town had only around 3,000 inhabitants in the 1840s, it had already been rebuilt once and renamed twice. The fortress city and the fleet it sheltered were inseparable from Russia's sense of its own security in the south.

• 4. The 250-Day Siege

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  German forces reached Sevastopol in 1941 and what followed was one of the most destructive sieges of the Second World War. The Wehrmacht and their Italian and Romanian allies bombarded the city with an arsenal that included history's largest-calibre railway artillery piece ever used in battle: the 80-centimetre calibre Schwerer Gustav. German forces also deployed specialised mobile heavy mortars to reduce Sevastopol's formidable fixed defences, including the Maxim Gorky Fortresses. The city's concrete and steel defences, built with the Crimean War in mind and then upgraded, proved capable of absorbing enormous punishment.

  After 250 days of fighting, Sevastopol fell to Axis forces in July 1942. German planners had already chosen a new name for the city in the event of a final German victory over the Soviet Union: Theodorichshafen, a reference to Theodoric the Great, the Gothic king whose people had inhabited Crimea until the 18th or 19th century. The broader plan was to designate Crimea for future colonisation by the Third Reich.

  The Red Army liberated Sevastopol on the 9th of May 1944. A year later the Soviet government awarded the city the title of Hero City, a designation given to settlements that had shown exceptional resistance during the war. The date of liberation, the 9th of May, was also the date on which Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, a coincidence that amplified the symbolic weight of Sevastopol's place in Soviet memory.

• 5. The Closed City

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  After the war, Soviet authorities sealed Sevastopol off from the outside world. Any non-resident who wanted to enter had to apply to the authorities for a temporary permit. On the 29th of October 1948, the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the Russian SFSR issued a formal order confirming the city's special status. The practical result was that Sevastopol existed as a military enclave within the Soviet state, its population overwhelmingly tied to the fleet.

  In 1954, under Nikita Khrushchev, both Sevastopol and the remainder of Crimea were administratively transferred from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. The city was organised as a municipality separated from the adjacent Crimean Oblast, covering a territory of 863.5 square kilometres and subdivided into four districts. Soviet academic publications from 1954 onward, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, recorded Sevastopol as part of the Ukrainian SSR.

  The city remained a centre for research as well as military activity. Scientists stationed there studied marine biology, and from the 1960s the military trained dolphins at Sevastopol for military purposes. That programme, unusual enough to stand out even in a city of exceptional historical oddities, continued for decades alongside the fleet operations that defined daily life for the city's population. The ethnic Russian majority, which stood at 74.4 percent in 1989, remained largely constant through the Soviet period and into independence.

• 6. The Black Sea Fleet Dispute

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  When Ukraine declared independence from the USSR in 1991, Sevastopol instantly became a source of friction. The city was now the principal base of the Ukrainian navy, but it also housed Russia's Black Sea Fleet, which Russia had no intention of abandoning. In June 1992, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk agreed to divide the former Soviet fleet between the two countries. Eduard Baltin was appointed joint commander of the Black Sea Fleet by both presidents on the 15th of January 1993.

  The political pressure was intense on both sides. On the 10th of July 1993, the Russian parliament passed a resolution declaring Sevastopol to be a federal Russian city. On the 20th of July 1993, the United Nations Security Council denounced the Russian parliament's decision, a move that Anatoliy Zlenko described as the first time the council had ever had to review and qualify the actions of a legislative body.

  Tensions continued to build through the mid-1990s. On the 28th of July 1993, Viktor Prusakov, one of the leaders of the Russian Society of Crimea, declared that his organisation was prepared for an armed mutiny and the establishment of Russian administration in Sevastopol. Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov publicly claimed the city, and in December 1996 the Russian Federation Council formally endorsed that claim. Ukraine responded by proposing a special partnership with NATO in January 1997.

  Resolution came through treaty rather than force. In May 1997, Russia and Ukraine signed the Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty, ruling out Moscow's territorial claims. That was followed by the Partition Treaty on the Status and Conditions of the Black Sea Fleet on the 28th of May 1997. Under the resulting agreement, Russia kept its naval base with around 15,000 troops stationed in Sevastopol. On the 27th of April 2010, the two countries extended the lease on Russia's Crimean facilities for 25 years beyond 2017, through 2042, with options to renew in five-year increments. The Ukrainian parliament ratified the extension by a 52 percent majority, 236 votes out of 450, after a brawl broke out in the chamber during debate. The Russian Duma ratified the same treaty by a 98 percent majority.

• 7. Annexation and Its Aftermath

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  On the 23rd of February 2014, a pro-Russian rally in Nakhimov Square declared allegiance to Russia and protested against the new government in Kyiv following the removal of president Viktor Yanukovych. Four days later, pro-Russian militia and Russian troops seized government buildings across Crimea. By the 28th of February, they controlled strategic sites including the military airport in Sevastopol.

  On the 16th of March 2014, a referendum was held in Sevastopol. Official results claimed an 89.51 percent turnout and a 95.6 percent vote to join Russia. Ukraine and the overwhelming majority of United Nations General Assembly members considered the referendum illegal and illegitimate. On the 18th of March 2014, Russia formally annexed Crimea, making Sevastopol a federal city of Russia alongside the Republic of Crimea.

  The international community did not accept the annexation. Under the Ukrainian legal framework, Sevastopol remains one of two cities with special status in Ukraine, the other being Kyiv. Russia's de facto control of the city coexists with a legal position in which most of the world continues to treat Sevastopol as Ukrainian territory. The pro-Russian Sevastopol City Council had already thrown its support behind Russian citizen Aleksei Chaly as a people's mayor during the annexation, refusing to recognise orders from Kyiv. After annexation, the Legislative Assembly of Sevastopol replaced the City Council entirely.

  By the 2001 Ukrainian census, the population was 71.6 percent ethnic Russian, 22.4 percent Ukrainian, and included smaller communities of Belarusians, Tatars, Crimean Tatars, Armenians, Jews, Moldovans, and Azerbaijanis. The city remains, as it has been for most of its existence, a place whose ethnic composition and administrative status point in different directions at once.