Russia’s Crimean Red Line Has Been Erased

In December 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood in the middle of the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall, delivering his annual address to the country’s Federal Assembly. Nine months removed from his formal annexation of Crimea, the Russian president unspooled a historical overview of Crimea’s supposed importance to the Russian body politic.

Crimea, as Putin claimed, was far more than simply a wayward chunk of rightfully Russian land. Rather, the peninsula was the “spiritual source” of the entire Russian nation—a province that presented “invaluable civilizational and even sacral importance” for all Russians. The language mirrored Putin’s annexation announcement that March, when he’d claimed that “in [Russians’] hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.” As Putin saw it, Crimea stood as the Temple Mount of Russia—as a Russian “holy land.” And this was, Putin assured his listeners in December, “exactly how we will treat it from now on and forever.”

At the time, few in Russia appeared to disagree. Nor, likewise, did those in the West, who largely rolled over in the face of Russia’s initial invasion in 2014. Suckered by Russian propaganda surrounding the peninsula’s supposedly pro-Russian tilt and convinced that any Ukrainian assault on Crimea could spark potential military escalation, Western voices largely shied away from backing any attempts at returning the peninsula to Kyiv’s control. This was seen perhaps most spectacularly last month, when news emerged that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had undercut Ukrainian efforts to target the peninsula because of concerns any attack “could lead to a nuclear war.”

Those concerns were perhaps understandable, insofar as Russian officials have continually rattled a nuclear saber about protecting Crimea from any Ukrainian reclamation efforts. But now, as Ukraine unleashes near-daily assaults on the peninsula, the notion that Crimea presents some kind of Temple Mount—or even any kind of red line—for Russians has crumbled.

In the face of continued drone attacks, long-range missile fires, sabotage operations, and annihilation of military assets across Crimea, Russians have hardly treated the Ukrainian peninsula as some kind of sacred land. Rather than rushing to protect Crimea, Russians have instead begun fleeing the region en masse. Rather than seeing Russians lining up to enlist to aid the Kremlin’s defense of the peninsula, Moscow continues mooting the potential of a second, and far broader, forced mobilization. And rather than resulting in any kind of nuclear conflagration, Russians’ subdued reaction to the continued bombardment of Crimea has dissolved Putin’s claims that the peninsula is some kind of special, sacrosanct land. As McGill University professor Maria Popova recently posted on X (formerly known as Twitter), “Crimea isn’t special, let alone a red line.”

Indeed, with few even noticing, Ukraine’s continued shelling and strikes on the peninsula have illustrated one clear lesson: The idea that Crimea is some kind of holy land that Russians will race to defend—an idea that far too many in the West previously swallowed—is dead. And in that death, a wealth of new opportunities has opened up for Kyiv and for the Western partners who are suddenly realizing Crimea is hardly the sacral land Putin once claimed.

For those familiar with the region’s history, the notion that Crimea was always some kind of “spiritual center” for the Russian nation, or that it was perpetually inseparable from Moscow, was always a rickety proposition. While there were historical links tethering the peninsula to the imperial center in Moscow—not least the peninsula’s outsized role in the eponymous Crimean War of the 1850s or World War II—Crimea is hardly some central node of Russian identity that Putin and his claque have claimed.

Just glance through the peninsula’s broader ethno-nationalist history. While tsarist forces first seized the province in 1783, Crimea was hardly a central destination for Russian settler-colonial efforts. Indeed, it wasn’t until World War II that Crimea was even majority ethnic Russian—and even then, only as a result of gargantuan Stalinist ethnic cleansing efforts, forcibly displacing tens of thousands of Crimean Tatars from their historic homeland.

Or look at the peninsula’s political preferences. While the Kremlin’s 1954 decision to transfer control of Crimea to Soviet Ukraine has seen overwrought attention in recent years, far less attention has been given to Crimeans’ actual voices and votes. For instance, in 1991 Crimeans joined every other Ukrainian province in voting for independence from Moscow. And in the intervening years, while Crimean leadership continually agitated for increased autonomy from Kyiv, Crimean residents never once voted for a return to the Kremlin’s embrace.

Not that that’s necessarily surprising. As polling in the months leading up to Russia’s 2014 invasion indicated, Crimeans’ desire for Russian annexation was a minority—and clearly declining—position. One survey of Crimeans, conducted by the International Republican Institute in mid-2013, found that less than a quarter of Crimeans wanted outright annexation. Likewise, the same poll found that the majority of Crimean residents identified primarily as something other than Russian, whether that be Ukrainian, Tatar, or simply Crimean.

All of which is to say: Contrary to Putin and his propagandists’ claims, Crimea was hardly some hotbed of pro-Kremlin sentiment, agitating for a return to Russian control. Such a reality is borne out in contemporaneous reportage, which highlighted how Russian militias had to force Crimean deputies to vote for annexation. (As notorious Russian war criminal Igor Girkin, one of the key figures in Russia’s 2014 invasion, recalled, he and other pro-Russian militia figures “didn’t see any support [for annexation] from any organ of government power” in Crimea.) Little surprise, then, that instead of any kind of free and fair vote on annexation, Moscow resorted to a ballot-by-bayonet referendum, with Moscow announcing that a ludicrous 97 percent of Crimeans backed Russian sovereignty over the peninsula.

Now, almost a decade after Putin first claimed Crimea as Russia’s alone, Ukraine’s efforts to bombard the peninsula into submission have begun in earnest. As the Economist recently wrote, “War has arrived in Crimea.” While last year’s strike against the primary Crimean bridge gained numerous headlines, the past few weeks have ramped up assaults on Crimean military assets to an unprecedented degree. There have been fires at local ammunition holdings; cruise missile strikes on naval assets in Sevastopol, which hammered ships and submarines alike; drones targeting Russia’s air defense infrastructure; and plenty more—and much of this in just the past few weeks. Moreover, a spectacular salvo of Ukrainian long-range fires obliterated the central command of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet—an attack that was caught on tape and decapitated much of Moscow’s naval command in the region.

Yet, even amid all of this mounting violence wracking the peninsula, the response from Russians has been largely muted (or at least as muted as an ongoing genocidal campaign of conquest can be). Part of this stems from Putin’s domestic desires to downplay Russian losses in Ukraine, attempting to maintain an air of both invincibility and inevitability about Russian military prowess. But part of that is also because Russians themselves have displayed an ongoing apathy regarding the assaults on Crimea. Rather than resulting in the kind of Pearl Harbor-style response that many Westerners feared, Russians have largely shrugged their shoulders. Instead of sparking a new onrush of military sign-ups, Moscow has struggled to meet basic enlistment targets, all while Kyiv continues to compile new weaponry to expand its arsenal dedicated to reclaiming Crimea. And instead of spiraling into nuclear exchanges, any likelihood of Moscow resorting to nuclear response has dissipated—undone both by pressure from Moscow’s allies (especially Beijing) but also by Kyiv calling Moscow’s bluff.

Thankfully, it does appear that Western policymakers are finally starting to digest this new reality. Whereas Western officials, such as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, previously warned that Crimea presented a “red line” for Putin, concerns out of Washington, London, and Brussels to the latest attacks in recent weeks have been largely nonexistent. If anything, Kyiv’s successful bombings have convinced Western partners to increase support; amid Ukraine’s escalating bombardment, the United States signaled that it would finally supply Ukraine with long-range missiles—so-called ATACMS—that would allow Kyiv to expand its array of targets in Crimea.

More broadly, the disintegration of the notion that Crimea presents any kind of red line for Putin is of a piece with supposed Russian red lines elsewhere, all of which have likewise crumbled. And with the disappearance of this Crimean “red line”—as well the dismantling of the idea that Crimea is some kind of holy land for Russians—there is no reason remaining for Western governments not to do everything in their power to back Ukrainian efforts at retaking every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.

After all, it was in the Crimean Peninsula that Moscow’s irredentist invasion first began in 2014. Given that Putin’s promises that Russians would rally to the peninsula’s defense have proved hollow, undone by Putin’s own hubris, it is only fitting that Crimea is where Russia’s revanchist efforts should end.