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A draft UN investigative report found that critics of secession within Crimea were detained and tortured in the days before the vote; it also found "many reports of vote-rigging. They're called the "Euromaidan" protests because they were about Europe and they happened in Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti Independence Square. Lots of Ukrainians had wanted the EU deal, partly because they thought it would help Ukraine's deeply troubled economy, and partly because they saw closer ties with Europe as culturally and politically desirable.
The second, deeper reason for the protests was that many Ukrainians saw Yanukovych as corrupt and autocratic and as a stooge of Russia. So his decision to reject the EU deal felt, to many Ukrainians, like he had sold out their country to Moscow.
This is why the protesters so quickly expanded their demands from "sign the EU deal" to "Yanukovych must step down. Over the months that followed, Yanukovych tried to break up the protests, first by sending in the dreaded "berkut" internal security forces to crack down, and next by passing a series of laws that severely restricted Ukrainians' basic rights of speech and assembly.
Both of these just made protests worse. By late January, they'd expanded to lots of other Ukrainian cities. In February, the parliament turned against Yanukovych, first voting to remove lots of his powers and end the crackdown, and then voting to remove him outright.
Not all Ukrainians supported the protests or their agenda; many had wanted the Russia bailout and wanted Yanukovych to stay.
Euromaidan also included a number of far-right ultra-nationalist groups, some of whom have been violent. This is why the Russian government and some Ukrainians, particularly in the more Russian-speaking east, see the protests as effectively disenfranchising Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Viktor Yanukovych was elected Ukraine's president in But he was ousted by popular protests and his own parliament in February He fled to Russia, where he is living in exile.
The key facts about Yanukovych are this: he is pro-Russian and, like lots of Ukrainians, actually a native speaker of Russian rather than Ukrainian , he has a well-earned reputation for corruption and heavy-handedness, and he had a base of support in Ukraine's predominantly Russian-speaking east but was never very popular in its predominantly Ukrainian-speaking west.
You may have heard the phrase "Orange Revolution": this refers to the mass protests in , after Yanukovych won a presidential election under widespread suspicion of fraud. The protests succeeded in blocking him from taking office, but he ran again in and appeared to win legitimately. Yanukovych alienated many Ukrainians, including his supporters, with his mishandling of the economy and especially his crackdowns on the Euromaidan protests.
While lots of Ukrainians were happy to see him go, others saw his ouster as illegitimate and undemocratic. This is particularly true in Ukraine's Russian-speaking east and in the heavily Russian region of Crimea. Since declaring independence in , Ukraine has been divided, and this crisis is an extension of that. When people talk about this divide, they typically refer to language. About two-thirds of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian as their native language, mostly in the country's west; about a third are native Russian-speakers, mostly in the east.
But the language divide is fuzzier than that. And language is really just a shorthand for describing a much more complicated political and ideological division. This all becomes clearer if we look at how Ukrainians have voted in national elections. Here's a series of maps: language in the top left and ethno-linguistic groups in the top right; the bottom two show how Ukrainians voted in the and elections.
You will notice that, in all four, there is a very clear line dividing the country's west from its east:. People in the west of Ukraine tend to regard Russia with suspicion, see themselves as European, and want to break away from Russia's orbit to join Europe. The protests were much, much stronger here. In every election, this half of the country has voted overwhelmingly for pro-European political candidates.
The eastern half of Ukraine, on the other hand, has voted overwhelmingly in favor of political candidates who are more sympathetic to Russia, including Yanukovych, who is from the east. They tend to look more fondly on Russia and see their two countries as more historically linked. There are still lots of statues of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin in the east. Ukrainians never really resolved the national identity crisis between its Russia-facing east and pro-European west that was sparked by its independence from the Soviet Union.
The current crisis is, in many ways, an extension and perhaps culmination of that internal — and external — dispute about their country's identity. It is also the culmination of some Russians' belief that eastern Ukraine — or even all of Ukraine — is not actually a separate country, but rightfully part of Russia. The east and west of Ukraine disagree so fundamentally about what sort of country they want to have, about what it means to be Ukrainian, that a big, internal political battle may have been quite likely.
For example, the EU trade deal that sparked all this only had about 43 percent popular support , mostly in the west; another 31 percent of Ukrainians said they wanted a trade deal with the Russia-led Customs Union instead. When Yanukovych rejected the EU deal, many western Ukrainians saw it as a betrayal, but eastern Ukrainians may have regarded a different decision the same way.
Ukraine, according to political scientist Leonid Peisakhin , "has never been and is not yet a coherent national unit with a common narrative or a set of more or less commonly shared political aspirations. Some Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the country's east and south, particularly in Crimea, have not quite reconciled themselves to being citizens of Ukraine over Russia.
Ideas that their region should be absorbed into Russia are very much alive. Even though Yanukovych was removed from power by protesters, mostly in the west, this has not resolved the nation's deeper identity crisis. All it did was shift power from a pro-Russian, eastern-based political party to a pro-European, western-based political party. That's upset pro-Russian Ukrainians in the country's east and south, including in Crimea, where pro-Russian demonstrators marched against the new government.
The Kremlin quietly backed those protests, including by sending in unmarked Russian troops, which took over government buildings in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine. In Crimea, that ended with a Russian military occupation and annexation.
In eastern Ukraine, it's led to ongoing fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian security forces, and in August with the Russian military overtly invading. You have to remember that Ukraine's present-day borders are very new and that its historical ties to Russia are very old. So the distinction between Ukraine and Russia is a bit blurrier than the distinction between, say, France and Germany. That line started blurring in the s, when Russian leader Catherine the Great began a process of "Russifying" Ukraine — making it Russian — that continued right up through the s.
This meant shipping in ethnic Russians, imposing laws that required schools to teach the Russian rather than Ukrainian language, and stationing lots of Russian troops in the area.
At some points in the s, the Ukrainian language was banned outright. In the s, Soviet leader Josef Stalin caused a famine in Ukraine that killed several million Ukrainians, mostly in the east. He then repopulated the area with ethnic Russians. In the s, Stalin forcibly relocated the ethnic Tatars who dominated Crimea's population, replacing them with Russians as well.
Some of those Tatars, who are Muslim and ethnically Turkic, have since moved back; they are a minority in Crimea and have expressed fear about returning to Russian rule. For most of this process, Russia focused overwhelmingly on the east, which has vast coal, iron, and some of the most fertile farmland on earth.
Ukraine's linguistic dividing line matches up almost perfectly with the line between its farmland in the east and forestland in the west. The effect of all this history is that lots of Ukrainians, very understandably, despise Russia and want nothing to do with it.
But there's also a significant proportion of Ukrainians whose families have substantial connections to Russia, who may remember the Soviet era fondly, and do not want to break away quite so fully as does the west. This national identity crisis has been centuries in the making, and it is a big issue today. On the surface, it's because Ukraine has a lot of native Russian-speakers and ethnic Russians, many of whom voted for Yanukovych in and did not support the Euromaidan protests that led to his removal.
So when Russian leaders talk about intervening to protect the rights of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, they might be myopically ignoring the very valid reasons that Yanukovych was ousted, but they do mean it. But there is much, much more going on here. Russians have long felt a special historical connection to Ukraine, which plays a central role in Russian national mythology.
Tsarist leaders cultivated the idea that Russia's cultural roots go back to ancient Greeks who settled on the Crimean peninsula, in modern-day Ukraine. While this is mostly made-up, it is true that Russia's first iteration as a great empire had its capital in present-day Ukraine. The idea of a special, ancient connection to Ukraine is especially important for Russian nationalists, who see it as a vital and eternal component of the greater Russian empire. Russian nationalism has seen a dramatic rise in the last few years, cultivated by Russian nationalist numero uno President Vladimir Putin, who has used this to distract Russians from their sinking economy and his tightening authoritarianism.
A special bond with Ukraine, and perhaps even the reacquisition of Ukraine, is in the Russian nationalist view not just about historic links but about reacquiring Russia's rightful place as a great power. It is also about righting the injustices of the Soviet Union's collapse, which they see as having left Russian territory and many Russians under the control of an unworthy Ukrainian government.
There is a more pragmatic aim here as well. From the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, Russia's meddling has been about preventing Ukraine from breaking away from Russian influence and falling under what Moscow sees as an ever-encroaching Western conspiracy to encircle Russia with hostile governments.
Russia may well have seen this crisis as a make-or-break moment for its special connection to Ukraine and wanted to intervene lest it lose Ukraine permanently. Since then, though, Putin's overheated nationalist rhetoric, and his state media's insistence that the Ukrainian government is a US-backed Nazi regime that threatens the world, has forced Putin to escalate far beyond what he probably wanted.
There are three different ways to think about President Vladimir Putin's decision to annex the Ukrainian region of Crimea, to support separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, and ultimate to invade. There's probably some truth to all three. Putin's popularity had been sinking since the economy cratered in , and, in , Russians protested against his fraud-ridden reelection, sending him into a paranoid obsession with what he sees as hostile efforts to topple him from power.
He responded by stirring up Russian nationalism and anti-Western fear. In March , he used these ideas as justification for annexing Crimea — which sent his popularity skyrocketing. Since the crisis began, Putin has also been cracking down severely on dissent within Russia, something it's easier to get away with while the world is distracted by Ukraine. But this nationalism may have grown beyond his control : Russia's far-right is more powerful than ever, and, with the economy on the verge of sanctions-imposed recession, Putin is so reliant on maintaining the nationalist fervor that he invaded eastern Ukraine even though this will clearly make things worse for him.
Russia does have a big naval base on Crimea, which it sees as strategically essential to projecting Russian power into the Black and Mediterranean Seas, and lots of economic and industrial interests in eastern Ukraine.
Putin likely saw a chance to quietly seize Crimea on the pretense of protecting it from Ukraine's chaos and serving the wishes of Crimeans to rejoin Russia. This same opportunism could apply for the ongoing crisis in eastern Ukraine : maybe he wants to invade to annex the territory and maybe he's just trying to force Ukraine to adopt a federal system , but either outcome could be about maintaining Russian influence.
It's entirely possible that Putin believes his own rhetoric, which says that Crimeans and eastern Ukrainians were calling to be saved by Russian military intervention, that the Ukrainian government has been seized by actual Nazis backed by the West, and that Moscow's political authority extends beyond Russia's borders to all Russian-speakers everywhere, including in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine.
After speaking with Putin in early March, Chancellor Angela Merkel described him as out of touch with reality and "in another world. But they are not doing anything that will physically force Putin to turn back his tanks, or return Crimea to Ukraine, which means that if he wants to keep invading Ukraine, despite those punishments, he can and will. The US and Europe are primarily punishing Russia by imposing several rounds of very tough economic sanctions, which are meant as punishment and to deter Russia from invading further.
While the sanctions initially targeted Putin and his inner political circle, they have since broadened to include the larger Russian economy, which was already at the edge of a recession. The sanctions are working in that they're hurting the Kremlin and the larger Russian economy, and it's possible that they have kept Putin from escalating even further than they would have otherwise, but they have definitely so far not gotten him to back down or withdraw from Crimea.
The burden of imposing these sanctions falls on the European Union, which is heavily reliant on Russian natural gas exports and will hurt its own economy by sanctioning Russia. While the geopolitical importance of the Black Sea is indisputable, more attention is needed to its separate actors.
Ukraine, having had the largest territory of coastline in the Black Sea before the illegal annexation of Crimea, is ideally positioned to play a central role in the future of the region. Ukraine is unique because of its history of economic volatility.
Furthermore, the loss of Crimea and Russian control over the Kerch Strait also led to a short-term loss of grain export partners because the country was now deprived of 10 percent of its export capacity without the Black Sea ports.
Nowadays, Ukrainian shipbuilding companies are utilizing just 25 to 30 percent of production capacities and the shipbuilding industry has reduced by times.
Ukraine could be more engaged in monitoring frozen conflicts on the borders of the Black Sea while protecting its coastal waters from the regional implications of these conflicts i. These rivers are crucial to trade and transport in the region, granting Ukraine a central place in the geopolitics of the Black Sea. The rivers of Ukraine serve as a bridge to an interconnected system of European inland waterways and the Eurasian system of freight transport corridors, where rivers form strategic water transport connections to the Volga and Don Rivers or the Bosporus.
So, a more stable and strengthened maritime complex in Ukraine could create an effective logistical system with the participation of sea and river fleet, the main task of which would be to ensure uninterrupted transportation of cargo between ports of different river basins.
Importantly, Crimea also lies on the intersection of critical energy and trade routes between Europe, Central Asia, Turkey, and Russia. Sevastopol is the only naval base on the Black Sea with the potential to equip and send new ships and military equipment for strategic purposes throughout the whole region.
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