Crimea was once a crossroads of civilisations, now it's stuck in a wartime cul-de-sac

Irish Times

4 hours ago

Every month, Ukraine unleashes three or four attacks on the Crimea bridge. The latest one, last week, used underwater explosives to try to damage the support structure, Ukraine said.
Each salvo forces the bridge to close, disrupting the main artery between the Russian mainland and the Black Sea peninsula for up to seven hours. While official information is scarce, a channel on the Telegram app warns motorists to avoid crossing, as it did during another recent attack, because a 'hail of shrapnel' peppers the bridge when Russia's considerable air defences blast the Ukrainian drones.
Ever since Russia seized
Crimea
in 2014 in a preview of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine eight years later, the peninsula has been a focal point of the conflict between the countries.
Moscow says its conquest righted a historical wrong, and demanded in ceasefire negotiations in Istanbul last week that any settlement include international recognition of Russian control. Ukraine vows to never abandon its claim.
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US president Donald Trump, amid his sporadic attempts to end the war in Ukraine, has also
waded into the argument
, suggesting that any peace settlement might include Washington's recognising Russian sovereignty over Crimea.
Overall, the war has solidified changes to life in Crimea that began with the annexation, isolating the peninsula as a scenic but volatile beach destination limited largely to Russians. The majority 'Crimea is ours' crowd – nicknamed after a Kremlin slogan celebrating the annexation – tends to downplay the conflict as an inconvenience.
Opponents, especially members of the indigenous Crimean Tatar minority, who have long accused Russia of systemic oppression, denounce the war for making Crimea less free, less cosmopolitan and far less hospitable.
People sit on a bench in front of a building with a large banner in support of Russia's military campaign in Ukraine, in Yalta, Crimea, in May 2023. Photograph: EPA
'No freedom, no choice – and on top of that, it's unsafe,' said a 35-year-old Yalta resident named Irina, who declined to use her full name out of fear of legal problems. 'It's like bingo, but in a bad way. It's a situation that people did not choose, but are forced to live in.'
Crimea has been a crossroads for millenniums, colonised by serial invaders from Mongol warriors to Genoese traders. Catherine the Great annexed it for Russia in 1783, and the second World War brought a Nazi occupation. Josef Stalin, Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met there in 1945, at the tsar's former palace at Yalta, to carve postwar Europe into spheres of influence.
In 1954, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred control over Crimea to Ukraine from Russia, an unremarkable move at the time, since both Ukraine and Russia were within the same country. In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Crimea remained part of Ukraine until Russian president Vladimir Putin seized it.
With its palm trees and pebble beaches resembling the south of France, Crimea has long been a summer playground. While roughly six million Ukrainians and Russians visited annually before the annexation, the numbers plummeted afterwards and then nosedived again with the invasion.
Some critics said nothing mattered more to Crimeans than exploiting tourists.
'If America came and said, 'You're going to be an American state now,' they would probably say, 'Okay, will we have a tourist season or not?'' Irina grumbled.
Several of Russia's worst setbacks in the war have occurred in Crimea. Repeated drone attacks forced the Russian navy to abandon Sevastopol, its home port for more than 220 years, to hide in distant Caucasian harbours. This year, security concerns prompted the city to cancel its May 9th Victory Day parade for the third year in a row.
The Kerch Strait Bridge was partly closed for four months after October 2022, when Ukraine severely damaged it with an explosives-laden truck. Now, every vehicle must be inspected before crossing, which some residents said gave it the feel of an international border.
This year, indications are that tourists might be inclined to ignore the war. On the May 1st national holiday, thousands of vehicles waiting to enter created a six-hour traffic jam, according to the Telegram bridge watch channel.
People walk in front of a poster of Russian president Vladimir Putin in Simferopol, Crimea, in March 2024. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images
Visitors cluster along the southern coast, distant from Ukraine's habitual military targets. Ekaterina, the owner of a small hotel, said guests often asked about drones and worried about crossing the bridge, but they still come. Several hotels are being built around hers, she noted.
Reminders of the war abound.
In June 2024, fragments from a Ukrainian missile killed five beachgoers and wounded more than 100, according to Russia's defence ministry. The next day, people went to the beach anyway, but wore name tags in case ambulance crews needed to identify them, one witness said.
Residents of Sevastopol described themselves as inured to endless air raid sirens, while people in larger cities such as Simferopol and Yalta said drones streaked overhead relatively rarely.
Igor (85), a philosophy professor living near the Nakhimov Naval Institute warfare academy, said he heard explosions almost nightly, but just hugged his Yorkshire terrier and waited for the attack to end. If every siren sent him to the bomb shelter, he would never sleep, he added.
The Crimea bridge regularly comes under attack from Ukraine. Photograph: EPA
Military vehicles crowd the roads, residents said, and large billboards exhort men to sign up. One version says: 'You like working in the fresh air? You want to improve your wellbeing, have an apartment and a land plot near the sea? Sign the contract and get 1 million roubles immediately.' (About €11,000.)
War fatalities among soldiers include more than 1,200 men either from the peninsula or stationed there, according to a tally maintained by Mediazona and the BBC Russian language service. Civilian deaths have been relatively rare.
The hotel owner, who sings in a small jazz ensemble, said the group avoided outdoor concerts but had recently performed in a military hospital. 'It was such a strange feeling – some people were severely injured, with limb amputations, but they were in the hall listening to us,' she said. 'You know it's like life and death walking hand-in-hand.'
Russia's most significant territorial gain in the war was the land along Ukraine's southern coast linking Crimea to mainland Russia, about 500km east. A new road provides an alternative route when the bridge comes under attack, but some dislike its repeated military checkpoints.
Several hundred people have been criminally prosecuted for political reasons since Russia took Crimea, according to OVD-Info, an independent organisation that tracks open court data. It also found 1,275 administrative cases filed against Crimeans accused of discrediting the armed forces, among the highest number of any Russian region. Defence lawyers for pro-Ukrainian activists can find themselves disbarred.
Despite improved living standards, Crimeans rank below the Russian national average in income, especially as the war has pushed up prices, although some benefit. Crimean wines gained a new cachet after the European Union banned most wine sales to Russia, so the cost of vineyard land more than quintupled in four years, one vintner said.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have left the peninsula, while a wave of Russians have emigrated from the mainland, although concrete numbers are elusive.
Ukraine says acknowledging Russian sovereignty would reward aggression. Crimeans often react to the idea that a war settlement might include recognition of the peninsula as Russian with a shrug, although they would welcome the end of sanctions that restrict travel and deter outside investment.
'Honestly speaking, the majority of Crimean people don't think about recognition, because they consider Crimea a part of Russia,' said Lubov V Gribkova, a foreign relations adviser to the mayor of Yalta.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times
.