Annexation of Crimea
Russia's swift, near-bloodless 2014 seizure of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, the first forcible annexation of European territory since 1945 and the opening move of the war.
In late February 2014, days after Ukraine's pro-Russian president fled Kyiv, soldiers in unmarked green uniforms began seizing airports, parliaments, and military bases across the Crimean peninsula. They carried the latest Russian weapons and spoke Russian, yet wore no insignia. Vladimir Putin dismissed them as local self-defense militias; a year later he admitted on television that they had been Russian troops all along. In under a month Russia annexed Crimea, the first forcible seizure of European territory since 1945.
The little green men
The operation was fast and nearly bloodless. Russia held a built-in advantage: thousands of its troops were already based at Sevastopol under the fleet lease, so reinforcing them looked, at first, like nothing out of the ordinary. On February 27, masked gunmen took the Crimean parliament in Simferopol and raised the Russian flag; under their guns, legislators installed a pro-Moscow premier, Sergey Aksyonov, and called a snap referendum on Crimea's status. The men Ukrainians nicknamed the little green men blockaded Ukrainian garrisons, ringed the airports, and cut the peninsula off from the mainland. Kyiv's new government, three days old and terrified of a wider war, ordered its soldiers not to shoot. Ukraine had also given up the Soviet nuclear arsenal it inherited two decades earlier, in exchange for Russian promises to respect its borders, so it had no deterrent to reach for. Within a week Russia controlled Crimea without a battle.
The referendum
On March 16, 2014, Crimea voted under armed occupation. The ballot offered no option to keep the existing arrangement: voters could join Russia or revert to a 1992 constitution that pointed the same way. Moscow reported 96.77 percent in favor on an 83 percent turnout, figures that international monitors, barred from observing, dismissed as fiction. Two days later Putin signed a treaty of accession. The UN General Assembly, by a vote of 100 to 11, declared the referendum invalid, and almost no country outside Russia has recognized the annexation since. The whole sequence, from the first masked gunmen to formal annexation, had taken barely three weeks.
Why Crimea
The prize was Sevastopol, home of Russia's Black Sea Fleet since 1783 and leased from Ukraine until 2042. A pro-Western Kyiv threatened that anchorage, and Crimea, handed to Soviet Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 and still majority Russian-speaking, offered the softest target. Putin justified the seizure as protecting Russians and righting a historical wrong. The West read it as naked conquest and answered with the first serious sanctions of the crisis. Russia was suspended from the G8, and Western governments blacklisted Russian officials, banks, and firms. The move fused Ukrainian opinion against Moscow, accelerated Kyiv's drive toward the EU and NATO, and set the template Russia would follow, on a far bloodier scale, when it invaded the rest of the country in 2022. The green men who took Crimea without firing a shot were the opening move of the largest land war in Europe since the Second World War.