A Bit More Detail

At least 100,000 Crimeans were unable to obtain Russian citizenship in the year following the peninsula's annexation by Russia, federal human rights ombudswoman Ella Pamfilova estimated in a report published on her department's website in May.

[. . .]

Most of the thousands of those living without official Russian citizenship are people who were born in mainland Ukraine but, despite spending years and sometimes decades living and working in Crimea, never re-registered as residents of Crimea.

Under Ukrainian rule, authorities mostly turned a blind eye to the 'illegal' section of the Crimean population. Crimea was, after all, part of the same country.

But since Russia's annexation of the peninsula in March last year, these Crimeans have been branded foreigners on what was once their own soil until they convince the authorities otherwise.

Following Russia's formal annexation of the peninsula on March 18 last year, all Crimean residents — a mix of ethnic Russians, ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars — were automatically declared Russian citizens unless they made use of a one-month window to renounce their new status.

In practice, however, the burden of proof was on Crimeans themselves — until they acquired a Russian passport, they would de facto be considered foreigners.

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Almost 18 years after it was founded, a small Catholic convent in Crimea's capital, Simferopol, was forced to close down in November when its three Franciscan nuns had to leave. They were refused the possibility of extending their residence permits in Crimea, the chancellor of the Odessa and Simferopol Catholic diocese, Krzysztof Kontek, told Forum 18 News Service from the Ukrainian city of Odessa on 15 January. The sisters, who are from elsewhere in Ukraine and Poland, had been helping in pastoral work in the city's Catholic parish. Their enforced departure came a month after the parish’s main priest was similarly forced to leave.

In addition, December saw the enforced departure of the last of Crimea's 23 imams and Muslim teachers from Turkey, a spokesperson for the Muslim Board told Forum 18 from Simferopol on 20 January.

Officials from the Crimean branch of Russia's Federal Migration Service said in October that only registered religious communities are able to invite foreign citizens. No religious community in Crimea or Sevastopol (an administratively separate city) has state registration recognized by the Russian authorities.

A Russian law from 31 December extended the deadline for re-registering religious communities (and other entities) in Crimea until 1 March.

Fines for religious books the Russian authorities regard as “extremist” seem to have reduced in recent months, though they did not stop. However, as a moratorium on raids, seizures of literature, and prosecutions in such cases ended, it remains unclear if such raids, fines, and confiscations will resume. Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses, and librarians have been particular targets.

The moratorium was announced by the head of Crimea's Russian-backed government, Sergei Aksyonov, in mid-October.

After more than two decades belonging to an independent Ukraine, the Crimean peninsula has become part of Russia, which has thereby gained an extra 27,000 km2 of territory and over two million new citizens. Ukraine and the West see this unprecedented event as annexation and a sign of the Kremlin’s neo-imperial ambitions. To countries not directly involved in the Ukrainian crisis, it is a dangerous violation of the Eurasian status quo that could cause widespread destabilisation in the area, while in Moscow’s eyes it is ‘the return of Crimea and Sevastopol to their homeland’, the reunification of the peninsula with Russia, and re-establishment of disrupted historical justice.

The change in Crimea’s status has triggered the most serious stand-off between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War, at a point when all post-Soviet Russia’s efforts to integrate with the West while preserving its ‘special position’ on security and other issues have collapsed, and American and European governments and commentators are united in accusing Moscow of flouting international law and the global order. Russia meanwhile counters with reminders of Western intervention in former Yugoslavia and the Middle East, and points to the results of the referendum in the peninsula as proof of the ‘legitimacy’ of its actions.

One thing has, however, become clear: the ‘Crimean question’ has at least two dimensions – the international and the internal. The ‘return to its home haven’ has not solved any of Crimea’s many problems; on the contrary, Russia’s leadership now faces an urgent need to find an adequate solution to them.

Until 2014, Crimea was nowhere near the top of the list of geopolitical problems in the post-Soviet space. The peninsula, unlike the Caucasus, was free from armed conflict involving refugees and displaced persons, not to mention dead bodies. Its status as an autonomous republic within Ukraine was also respected. Occasionally, voices could be heard in Kyiv calling for an end to Crimean autonomy, but such bizarre ideas never got very far. Ukraine’s territorial integrity (with Crimea included) was recognised by a bilateral treaty signed by Moscow and Kyiv in 1997 and ratified by Russian Federal law in 1999. It was even renewed for 10 years in 2008, despite Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s support for his Georgian counterpart Mikhail Saakashvili in the Five Day War in the Caucasus.

Before 2014, there was also no question of a de facto state with a separate, non-Ukrainian infrastructure. It was a mere five days before the 16 March referendum on the peninsula’s status that the Supreme Council and Sevastopol City Council together passed a Declaration of Independence. This independence was however extremely short-lived: the process of absorbing Crimea into the Russian Federation effectively began on 18 March.

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