The Annexation of Crimea

MAR 18 2014 · 12:00

Vladimir Putin signs the treaty admitting Crimea and Sevastopol to the Russian Federation, Kremlin, 18 March 2014. Place: Kremlin, Moscow (treaty signed); Simferopol, Crimea (referendum, 16 March) Figures: Vladimir Putin, Russian President · Sergey Aksyonov, installed Crimean leader · Viktor Yanukovych, ousted Ukrainian President · the unmarked Russian troops (little green men) who took the peninsula without insignia Little Green Men On 27 February 2014, three days after Yanukovych flees Kyiv, soldiers in unmarked uniforms seize the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol. They install Sergey Aksyonov as prime minister of an autonomous Crimea that has not, until now, sought to be one. By the following weekend, similar uniformed personnel hold every Ukrainian military base, airport, and government building on the peninsula. Putin denies they are Russian troops; in April he will acknowledge they were. The 16 March referendum, organized at two weeks' notice under occupation, reports 96.77 percent in favor of joining Russia. The annexation treaty is signed at the Kremlin on 18 March. Putin's accompanying speech invokes Crimea's historical Russianness back to the baptism of Vladimir the Great in 988, the Crimean War, Sevastopol's defense in 1941–44, and Khrushchev's 1954 transfer of Crimea from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR as an administrative act within a single Soviet state. The argument: Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea was always a Soviet-era technicality, and the technicality has now been corrected. The Helsinki Settlement Broken The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 had committed all signatories, the USSR among them, to the inviolability of frontiers and the territorial integrity of states. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum had committed Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom to respect Ukraine's existing borders in exchange for Ukraine's surrender of the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal. Both commitments are now visibly broken without effective Western response. Sanctions are imposed and absorbed; Russia is expelled from the G8; SWIFT is not yet touched. The first forcible annexation of European territory since 1945 sets the conditions for [[invasion-of-ukraine-2022]] eight years later. The lesson drawn by Western capitals (that Russia must be deterred more credibly) and the lesson drawn by the Kremlin (that the cost of redrawing borders is manageable) point in opposite directions and lead, by their interaction, to the larger war. The Westphalian principle of territorial integrity, the load-bearing assumption of the UN Charter (see [[un-charter-1945]]), is now openly contested in Europe. Video: Euronews full recording of Vladimir Putin's address to the Federal Assembly and the Kremlin signing of the treaty incorporating Crimea into the Russian Federation, 18 March 2014.