Ukraine’s renunciation of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, is placed by the United States of Donald Trump as a condition for a peace plan with Moscow. Housing the Russian fleet and allowing control of the Black Sea, this militarized territory is highly strategic. But it is also strongly symbolic for the two belligerents.
For more than ten years at the heart of the conflict between Moscow and kyiv, Crimea has been put back on the scene by Donald Trump. Washington hopes that Ukraine renounces recovering this territory, annexed by Russia in 2014, in order to negotiate a peace plan with Vladimir Putin.
If after their discussion in head on the sidelines of the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday, the American president said to believe that Volodomyr Zelensky is ready to draw a line on this strategic peninsula, the Ukrainian president has so far rejected this hypothesis.
• A territory annexed by Russia in 2014
Crimea is a peninsula of 27,000 km² south of Ukraine which has been a geostrategic node for 2,000 years. It was for the first time annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783 after having been a territory of the Ottoman Empire.
In 1921, the peninsula was integrated into the USSR. It was in 1954 that she went under Ukrainian control. That year, in a symbolic gesture, the boss of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev offered Crimea to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, integrated into the USSR.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine which has become independent made this territory to the strong Russian -speaking population an autonomous region.
In 2014, the situation changed. The Ukrainian President Pro -Russian Viktor Ianoukovitch – who blocked the association agreement between kyiv and the European Union – is dismissed, pushed outside by the Pro -European.
Pique to the heart, Vladimir Putin ordered his soldiers on February 27 to seize several strategic places in Crimea including the parliament and the airport of the regional capital, Simferopol. Following a referendum with a nebulous course, Moscow proclaims the annexation of the Crimea.
An annexation that has not been recognized by the international community and which has since been worth many sanctions on the part of European or the United States.
• A strategic peninsula
Crimea, now disputed by two countries at war, is a highly strategic territory. It allows control over the Black Sea and the Small Azov Sea, as well as the commercial roads that cross them. By annexing Crimea, Moscow has annexed a large maritime space, a large exclusive economic area, where around forty hydrocarbon deposits are located.
If this peninsula was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 a tourist destination with the beaches and places of prized vacation, it has become very militarized. She is like “an immense aircraft carrier attached to Ukraine”, image with Challenges, the American historian and journalist Anna Appelbaum.
The port of Sébastopol is home to the important Russian fleet: attack submarines, frigates, hunters, missiles … It is from this territory, linked to Ukraine by a small arm, that Moscow orchestrates all of its military operations carried out in the south of Ukraine. It serves as a rear base for Russian forces: from there are sent reinforcements and the maintenance of the devices is managed there.
Many attacks have been carried out by Ukraine on air bases or Crimean fuel deposits in response to the Russian invasion of February 2022. Russian submarines and ships were targeted in the Black Sea.
Without having claimed them, kyiv is also held responsible for two attacks on the symbolic bridge of Kerch. An attack on the car trapped in October 2022 and attack of drones in July 2023. Inaugurated in 2018, four years after the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Moscow, the bridge connects the territory annexed to the Taman region in southern Russia. It is the symbol of the region’s attachment to Moscow, and conversely a provocation for the kyiv regime.
On March 25, the United States announced that it had agreed with Russia and Ukraine a truce in the Black Sea with the reactivation of an agreement allowing commercial navigation and exports of Ukrainian agricultural products. However, the contours of this truce remain very uncertain.
• A highly symbolic territory
Beyond its strategic importance, Vladimir Putin made Crimea a symbol of conquering Russian power. For kyiv, it is a symbol of sovereignty and a major political objective. In the eyes of Ukraine, Crimea is the alpha and the omega of war with Russia that started in their eyes over ten years ago.
In August 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky said that “the war in Ukraine began with Crimea and had to end with its release”. Since then, he continues to hammer his desire to recover it. On April 23, the Ukrainian president repeated that Crimea was “their territory”.
“Today, on the Ukrainian side, it is clear that there are not the forces necessary to release the Crimea. But recognizing its annexation would come back in my opinion to open Pandora’s box,” explains Oksana Mitrofanova, teacher-researcher on Ukraine at Unalco and Docteure in Political Science, in 20 Minutes.
“This would create a legal precedent which could open the way to an annexation by Russia of the four regions which are currently partly occupied,” she abounds.
This is what the Russian diplomacy chief, Sergei Lavrov, asked this Monday, April 28. He posed as a condition for any negotiation with kyiv the recognition by the International Community of the Russian annexation of Crimea and other Ukrainian regions annexed in 2022 while the Kremlin said for his part to be ready for discussions “without prerequisite”.
Constraining Ukraine to recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea would contravene the principles which found the international order established with the creation of the United Nations according to experts.
It would be “the return of the right of conquest”, considers Elie Tenenbaum, of the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), interviewed by the Agency France-PRESE. “The message that this sends is that it can be paying, at least for the great powers, to violate this ban on the use of force,” adds Lauri Mälksoo, professor at the University of Tartu in Estoni.
When Michel Eperling, professor at the Max-Plack Institute in Frankfurt in Germany, believes that “such a precedent could have” extremely destabilizing, even catastrophic, consequences for world peace “.
