Russia-Ukraine War: Live Updates and Crimea News

KYIV, Ukraine — The Crimean Peninsula dangles off Ukraine’s southern coast like a diamond, blessed with a temperate local weather, expansive seashores, lush wheat fields and orchards full of cherries and peaches.

It is usually a crucial staging floor for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Related through bridge to Russia and serving as a house to Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet, Crimea gives a significant link within the Russian army’s provide chain that helps tens of hundreds of troopers now occupying an unlimited swath of southern Ukraine.

For President Vladimir V. Putin, it's hallowed floor, having been declared a part of Russia by Catherine the Nice in 1783, serving to pave the best way for her empire to develop into a naval energy. The Soviet ruler Nikita S. Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine in 1954. And since Ukraine was then a Soviet republic, not a lot modified.

However when the Soviet Union collapsed almost 4 a long time later, Russia misplaced its jewel. Mr. Putin thus claimed to be righting a historic incorrect when he illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.

Mr. Putin promised on the time that he had no intention of additional dividing Ukraine. But eight years later, in February, tens of hundreds of Russian troopers stormed north out of the peninsula, kicking off the present battle.

In current days, army targets in Crimea have come underneath assault, and the peninsula as soon as once more finds itself on the fulcrum of an excellent energy battle.

Navy Significance

Early within the battle, Russian troops surging from Crimea seized swaths of the Kherson and Zaporizhia areas that stay the important thing to Russia’s occupation of southern Ukraine.

Crimea, in flip, provides key logistical assist for Russia to take care of its occupation military, together with two predominant rail links that Russia depends on for transferring heavy army gear. Crimean air bases have been used to stage sorties in opposition to Ukrainian positions, and the peninsula has supplied a launching floor for long-range Russian missiles.

The peninsula can be residence to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, serving to Russia keep dominion over the ocean, together with a naval blockade that has crippled Ukraine’s financial system.

A Place within the Solar

Russia is chilly — a fifth of the nation is above the Arctic Circle. However it may be positively balmy within the sun-drenched Crimean metropolis of Yalta.

“Russia needs its paradise,” wrote Prince Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Nice’s basic and lover, when he urged her to say the land.

Crimea is the place czars and Politburo chairmen saved trip properties. Earlier than the West imposed sanctions on Russia for illegally annexing the peninsula, it was a spot the place rich Jap Europeans went to unwind and social gathering.

“Casinos buzz and ping everywhere amid the city’s pine-bowered alleyways,” a New York Occasions Journey article proclaimed about Yalta in 2006, including: “Much — if not everything — goes in this seaside boomtown.”

Tourism fell steeply after 2014. However when explosions rang out at an air base final week close to Crimea’s western coast, there have been nonetheless guests at close by resorts taking photographs and movies as black smoke obscured the solar.

Ties to Russia

“Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia in the hearts and minds of people,” Mr. Putin declared in his 2014 tackle marking the annexation. However his is a selective studying of historical past.

Over the centuries, Greeks and Romans, Goths and Huns, Mongols and Tatars have all laid declare to the land.

And maybe no group in Crimea has watched the unfolding battle with as a lot trepidation because the Tatars, Turkic Muslims who migrated from the Eurasian steppes within the thirteenth century.

They have been brutally focused by Stalin, who — in a foreshadowing of the Kremlin’s justification for its present battle — accused them of being Nazi collaborators and deported them en masse. Hundreds died within the course of.

In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev, the final Soviet chief, allowed Tatars to return to Crimea. And earlier than the 2014 annexation, they made up about 12 p.c of Crimea’s inhabitants, numbering about 260,000 there.

In 2017, Human Rights Watch accused Moscow of intensifying the persecution of the Tatar minority in Crimea, “with the apparent goal of completely silencing dissent on the peninsula.”