2014: how Russia seized Crimea

Ten years ago — in the early hours of 23 February 2014 — Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his personal advisers and military and security chiefs. The meeting agreed that Russia should seize the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.

Less than 24 hours earlier Putin’s placeman in Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych, had fled Kyiv after three months of mass popular protests. He had then been voted out of office by the Ukrainian Parliament.

Even before Putin’s meeting had finished, Russia was already transporting marine and Spetsnaz (Special Operations) units to the Anapa airfield on the Russian mainland opposite Crimea. The airfield was to serve as the base for the seizure of the peninsula.

In the following days Russian troops were flown into Crimea itself. More troops, and also armour and artillery, were brought in by landing ships. Russian airpower was boosted with the arrival of combat helicopters at the Kacha airbase to the north of Sevastopol.

These reinforcements strengthened the Russian military forces already based in Crimea. Under an agreement signed with Ukraine in 1997, whereby Russia leased naval bases on the peninsula for use by its Black Sea fleet, Russia was allowed to station up to 25,000 servicemen in the bases.

Putin later claimed that the despatch of Russian troops from 23 February onwards was allowed under the terms of the 1997 agreement: The “ceiling” of 25,000 servicemen had never been breached.

But this argument, and the mission with which the troops had been entrusted, ignored other clauses in the agreement.

Those clauses stated that Russian military personnel had to show their military ID cards when crossing the Ukraine-Russia border, and that they could operate “outside of their deployment sites” only after “co-ordination with the competent Ukrainian agencies”.

The lease also included a clause whereby Russia agreed to “respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, honour its legislation, and refrain from interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine.”

Russian soldiers, stripped of their military insignia, began to patrol the streets and surround Ukrainian military bases. They were accompanied by members of the local militia which they had helped create in order to give the appearance of a popular indigenous uprising.

Prominent amongst the local militia were members of the Salem and Baskaki criminal gangs, recruited by the FSB (Russian security service) through its connections with the Solntsevskaya Brotherhood, one of the largest organised crime clans in Russia.

On 26 February Putin’s political allies in Crimea attempted to convene a meeting of the Crimean Supreme Council. But 7,000 Tatars turned up to protest, easily outnumbering the 2,000 pro-Russian protestors.

Tatars

The Tatars had mobilised to support the elected government, and to oppose any attempt to transfer sovereignty over the peninsula to Russia.

Tatars were Crimea’s indigenous population. In 1944 Stalin had ordered their mass deportation to Uzbekistan. Half of the 200,000 deportees did not even survive the journey. From 1954 onwards Tatars began to return to the peninsula. By 2014 they numbered between 12% and 15% of the population. They had no desire to return to Russian rule.

The meeting of the Supreme Council due to take place on 26 February did not go ahead. Although the start time was repeatedly pushed back, the session remained inquorate.

In the early hours of 27 February Spetsnaz forces seized control of the buildings of the Supreme Council and the Crimean Council of Ministers. Later in the morning armed members of the local militia visited deputies in their homes and workplaces to ensure that they attended that day’s parliamentary session.

Even so, at most only 64 of the Supreme Council’s 100 deputies were recorded as having attended. Some of the 64 later issued statements saying that they had been absent and that their electronic voting cards had been used without their permission.

The Council meeting, such as it was, passed votes of no confidence in the Council of Ministers and in the Prime Minister. It voted to replace the latter with Sergei Aksyonov, although his Russian Unity Party had won just 4% of the vote and three seats in the 2010 Crimean parliamentary elections.

The meeting also agreed to hold a referendum on 25 May on whether the Crimean constitution of 1992 should be reinstated, which would amount to a form of autonomy within Ukraine.

In the following week Putin and his Crimean allies held further discussions about the wording of the referendum. By 5 March they had decided that the wording should include the “option” of annexation by Russia.

The following day a further meeting of the Supreme Council loyally overturned the decisions it had made only a week earlier regarding the wording and date of the referendum.

The date of the referendum, originally planned for 25 May but subsequently brought forward to 30 March, would be 16 March. That left just ten days for campaigning. In the event, campaigning for any outcome other than absorption by Russia was impossible.

There would be two questions on the ballot paper: “Are you for Crimea re-uniting with Russia, as a subject of the Russian Federation? Are you for the reinstatement of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Crimea and for the status of Crimea as part of Ukraine?”

Nothing

Nothing on the ballot paper allowed voters to opt for the status quo. The first question was pointless when Russia had already decided, as it had, that it would absorb Crimea into its territory.

The second question was meaningless to anyone who had no memory or knowledge of the constitution adopted for 13 days 22 years earlier. An additional complication was the fact that two different constitutions had been adopted by the Crimean Supreme Council in 1992.

In the run-up to the day of the referendum billboards across the peninsula proclaimed the choice to be one between “Nazi rule” by Kyiv or “reunification” with Russia.

Russian troops occupied the peninsula’s television and radio stations, the offices of the telecommunications provider, and the Crimean Internet Exchange. Ukrainian television was taken off the air and replaced by Russian channels. Telephone and internet communications with the rest of Ukraine were cut off.

Leaders of the peninsula’s Tatar community denounced the referendum as a sham and called for Tatars to boycott it. Activists who attempted to challenge the staging of the referendum were intimidated and arrested.

The Russian media boasted of the international observers who would be present for the referendum. But they were silent about the fact that the observers were members of pro-Putin far-right organisations.

Referendum observers included members of the Parti Communautaire National-Européen, Jobbik, Fiamma Tricolore, Ataka, Vlaams Belang, Som Catalans, Forza Italia, Samoobrone, the French National Front, Dveri, and the Freedom Party of Austria.

Other observers included Srdja Trifkovic (a Srebrenica-genocide-denier who had spoken in defence of Radovan Karadzic at his trial for war crimes), Johan Backman (a far-right Finnish propagandist for Putin), and members of the Alliance of European National Movements (which included the British BNP amongst its affiliates).

Unsurprisingly, the observers gave the referendum a clean bill of health. In fact, the referendum was anything but free and fair.

The Crimean authorities did not even have access to an up-to-date electoral register. The Ukrainian Central Election Commission refused, for obvious reasons, to recognise the referendum. It therefore blocked access to the Voter Registers for Crimea and Sevastopol.

Russian citizens were allowed to vote, ballot papers were printed off on ordinary office paper, journalists were denied access to polling stations, and armed soldiers patrolled outside of the stations.

The turnouts and results of the individual polling stations were not announced. All (claimed) figures were sent to the Crimean Central Election Committee, which subsequently announced the overall Crimea-wide result of the referendum.

The authorities claimed a turnout of 83% and a 97% vote in favour of “re-unification”, meaning that just over 80% of the total electorate had voted for “re-unification”.

Assuming that the Tatar boycott had been successful, this figure would have required every single ethnic-Russian voter (65% of the Crimean population) to have backed “re-unification”, plus every single ethnic-Ukrainian voter (15% of the Crimean population).

The official figures were contradicted by a report briefly posted on the website of the President of Russia’s Council on Civil Society and Human Rights two months later. According to that report, turnout had been between 30% and 50%. Support for “re-unification” had been between 50% and 60% of votes cast.

On 18 March, two days after the referendum, Putin convened an assembly of all members of the lower and upper houses of the Russian Parliament. Crimea and Sevastopol — constitutionally, two separate entities — were formally incorporated into the Russian Federation.