Crimea

Khans, sultans and tsars

Greeks founded colonies on Crimea’s coasts from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE.^[2] The Crimean Khanate, a Tatar state that grew from the remnants of the Golden Horde, accepted Ottoman overlordship in 1475.^[2] Russia and the Ottoman Empire fought over the Black Sea for two centuries. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 gave Russia forts on the Kerch Peninsula and made the Crimean Tatar state independent.^[2]

In 1783 Catherine the Great annexed the peninsula, and it became Russian territory.^[2] In the Crimean War of 1853–56, British and French armies landed at Sevastopol in September 1854 and besieged it for almost a year.^[2]

Deportation, and the 1954 transfer

After the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, the Crimean Tatars declared an independent republic. It ended with the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik forces in the civil war, and in 1921 Crimea became an autonomous Soviet republic inside Russia.^[2][4] In May 1944 the Soviet regime deported the remaining Crimean Tatars, some 200,000 people, to Siberia and Central Asia, accusing them of collaborating with Nazi Germany.^[2][4] Crimea was then downgraded to an ordinary province (oblast) of Soviet Russia.^[4]

On 19 February 1954 the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet approved moving Crimea from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine.^[4] The reasons given were the 300th anniversary of the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav between the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate and the tsar of Muscovy, and Crimea’s economic and cultural ties with Ukraine.^[4] The historian Mark Kramer finds neither convincing. He argues that Nikita Khrushchev used the transfer to tighten Soviet control of Ukraine and win allies in a power struggle in Moscow.^[4] He also notes that it followed the Soviet constitution’s rules of the time: both republics’ parliaments consented.^[4] Crimea’s population then was about 75% Russian and 25% Ukrainian.^[4]

“the territorial proximity of Crimea to Ukraine, the commonalities of their economies, and the close agricultural and cultural ties”^[4]

Crimea in independent Ukraine

In 1991 Crimea became an autonomous republic again. When the Soviet Union dissolved in December that year, it passed to independent Ukraine.^[2] Russia accepted Ukraine’s borders in the December 1991 accords that ended the Soviet Union, and again in the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994, when Ukraine agreed to give up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons.^[4][2]

Ethnic Russians were a majority on the peninsula, and a short-lived independence movement in 1994 ended with the abolition of Crimea’s presidency.^[2] Russia and Ukraine divided the Black Sea Fleet, Russia leased the port facilities at Sevastopol, and their 1997 Treaty of Friendship confirmed Crimea as Ukrainian territory.^[2] In 2010 President Viktor Yanukovych extended the Sevastopol lease to 2042.^[2] Meanwhile Crimean Tatars came home: about 38,000 lived there in 1989, and roughly 300,000 around 2000.^[2]

March 2014

Yanukovych fled Kyiv in February 2014 after months of protests. Within days, masked gunmen, later identified as Russian troops, seized Crimea’s parliament and other key sites. Pro-Russian legislators met in closed session and chose Sergey Aksyonov as prime minister.^[2] In March Putin won his parliament’s approval to send troops, and within days Russian forces and local pro-Russian groups controlled the peninsula.^[2]

On 16 March 2014 a referendum on joining Russia reported 97% in favour. The interim government in Kyiv called the vote unconstitutional, Crimean Tatar leaders called for a boycott, and many irregularities were reported.^[2] Two days later, on 18 March, President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty making Crimea part of Russia.^[2] In May 2014 a report by a Russian presidential human rights council estimated that turnout may have been as low as 30%, with 50–60% of those voters choosing Russia.^[2]

On 27 March 2014 the UN General Assembly passed resolution 68/262 by 100 votes to 11, with 58 abstentions.^[5] It said the referendum had “no validity” and called on all states not to recognise any change in the status of Crimea or Sevastopol.^[3] Only a handful of countries recognised the annexation.^[2]

“Underscores that the referendum held in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol on 16 March 2014, having no validity, cannot form the basis for any alteration of the status of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea or of the city of Sevastopol”^[3]

A bridge, a war and peace plans

In May 2018 Russia opened a 19 km bridge over the Kerch Strait, giving Russia a direct link to Crimea.^[2] In November that year Russia captured three Ukrainian naval vessels and their crews in a clash near the strait.^[2]

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the bridge became a key supply route for Russian forces. A truck bomb destroyed a 275 m section of its road deck on 8 October 2022, and naval drones damaged it again on 17 July 2023.^[2]

In April 2025 Reuters reported that a US peace plan included US legal recognition of Russia’s control of Crimea. A later US plan, in November 2025, also left Crimea with Russia.^[6] In 2014 Ukraine’s government committed never to accept the annexation.^[5] As of April 2026, none of the plans had produced a settlement.^[6]