Contested turf: a troubled past and a divided people

Crimea, a peninsula on Ukraine’s Black Sea Coast, is about twice the size of Northern Ireland and home to about two million people. About 60 per cent of its population is ethnic Russian, 24 per cent ethnic Ukrainian, and 12 per cent Crimean Tatar.

Parts of ancient and medieval Crimea had many different rulers, including the Scythians, Greeks, Mongols and Venetians. In a key moment in Orthodox Church history, Prince Vladimir of ancient Rus was in 988 baptised into Christianity on the coast at Chersonesos. The khanate of the Crimean Tatars, Muslims who speak a Turkic language, controlled the peninsula for more than three centuries from about 1441, mostly as an Ottoman protectorate.

Empress Catherine the Great annexed the territory for Russia in 1783, and her lover Grigory Potemkin is credited with founding the port of Sevastopol. The Black Sea naval fleet that is still based there.

As Europe’s powers jostled for influence, Russia lost the 1853-6 Crimean War to an alliance of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire. Many Tatars fled the fighting.

Crimea experienced fierce fighting during Russia’s 1917-21 civil war and again during the second World War. In 1944 Joseph Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis and deported all 200,000 or so of them to Siberia and central Asia. About half died on the way. Many Russians then moved to Crimea, and Tatars returned only in the early 1990s.

In February 1945 Stalin welcomed Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt to Yalta for a historic conference to decide the geopolitical shape of Europe.

In 1954 Crimea was transferred from the Soviet Union’s Russian republic to its Ukrainian republic by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1991 Crimea voted in favour of Ukraine’s independence – but by the narrowest margin of any region in the new country.