A Brief History
On February 19, 1954, the Soviet Politburo, the highest policy making organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ordered the Crimean Oblast to the Ukrainian SSR. The Crimea had previously been part of the Russian SFSR, and numerous cultures, kingdoms, and empires before that.
Digging Deeper
After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, a referendum of Crimean citizens voted to become an autonomous region within the Ukrainian SSR and in 1992, within an independent Ukraine. In 1994, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States agreed to the Budapest Memorandum, a treaty that addressed former Soviet nuclear weapons and the sovereignty of Ukraine. Russia and the US both guaranteed Ukrainian territorial integrity, including the Crimea.
In 2014, Russia illegally and forcibly seized and annexed the Crimea from Ukraine, and in 2022 invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine, a war that continues today.
Question for students (and subscribers): Should Ukraine keep fighting until the Russians are totally kicked out of Ukraine? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
If you liked this article and would like to receive notification of new articles, please feel welcome to subscribe to History and Headlines by liking us on Facebook and becoming one of our patrons!
Your readership is much appreciated!
Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
DeBenedictis, Kent. Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’ and the Annexation of Crimea: The Modern Application of Soviet Political Warfare. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Kent, Neil. Crimea: A History. Hurst, 2016.
The featured image in this article, a map by Hellerick of the establishment of the boundaries of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic in 1917-1928, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
