Why Does Russia Want Crimea So Badly? Cambridge Professor Rory Finnin Unpacks the “Crimea Is Ours” Mindset

To begin, I ask Professor Finnin the simplest question that can be asked: What is Crimea? 

Taking it in stride, Finnin responds just as simply: 

“Crimea is an extension of Ukraine’s southern steppe. It’s a natural geographical continuation of Ukraine’s territory—a peninsula that juts out into the Black Sea, which is strategically very important for the security of Europe and Eurasia.”

Finnin knows a fair bit about this stretch of land. An Ohio native, he first came to Ukraine as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in 1995. Visiting Crimea, Finnin had experiences that confounded his expectations. He began to see how deeply Crimea was misunderstood around the world. Finnin has spent the ensuing decades studying Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, its languages, and its communities. His book Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity represents a new cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region and confronts the long, unacknowledged afterlife of Russian and Soviet settler colonialism.

“Crimea has historically been what we might call a hinge or a pivot point,” says Finnin.

The words “hinge” or “pivot” will come up often as we try to understand Russia’s fixation on the peninsula. “There are lots of ways to think about Crimea,” says Finnin, so we take a step back—what is Russia? What is Ukraine? And why and how does Crimea matter to each?

“Crimea is a colony of the Russian Empire, later Soviet Russia, and now contemporary Putinist Russia. Russians settled in the areas where sites of ethnic cleansing and displacement happened. Reclaiming the colony holds immense symbolic and imaginative significance for Russia. It proclaims that the empire is back and striking back—which helps explain why Crimea is a site and a springboard for all this violence today.”

Was Crimea ever voluntarily part of Russia?

“No. Russia has no natural land connection to Crimea. The only way it can claim the peninsula is through a history of conquest.

Crimea had long been the dominion of the Crimean Tatar Khanate—a Sunni Muslim polity aligned with the Ottoman Empire. Catherine II conquered Crimea in 1783, and it became absorbed into the Russian Empire. The indigenous peoples were slowly erased, murdered, and displaced. In 1944 , Stalin finished what the czars started: mass displacement and ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars, as well as other indigenous groups, the Krymchak , the Qara’im .

In 1954, Soviet Russia transferred Crimea to Soviet Ukraine, not by mistake or as a gift, but because Crimea’s economy after World War II was very destitute. Removing 200,000 people who are integral to its economy and industry can have devastating effects.

When Ukraine takes responsibility for the Crimean Peninsula, it is the Ukrainian Soviet elites who bring it back to life. A lot of the infrastructure projects that had not succeeded under Soviet-Russian administration ended up succeeding under the Ukrainian one.

At the time, Soviet elites talked about Crimea as ‘a natural extension of Ukraine.’ Both in documents and archives, we see that they acknowledged that Ukraine would handle its needs more efficiently. They're not hiding from us at all; they're very explicit about it. 

All of the different sanitoria, the tourist destinations, really thrive when Crimea is finally brought within Soviet Ukraine. It makes complete geographical, economic, and historical sense. That is why Crimea became this kind of ‘Soviet paradise’ after World War II. Ukrainians resurrected its economy.”

Fast forward to 2014, and Russia attempts to annex Crimea. What happened?

“Let me say something obvious since 2008: Russia is an aggressive expansionist land empire. Following the logic of an expansionist land empire, it invades and seizes Crimea when it builds up the military, political, and economic capacity to do so. Russia seizes on the moment of turmoil and upheaval in Kyiv in 2014—the one Russia itself was involved in manufacturing—when Ukraine’s former president Viktor Yanukovych fled from Kyiv, undercover and with Russian military support. 

What we could not necessarily see in real time on CNN or BBC then was an unfolding operation both by Russian regular forces and by so-called Spetsnaz units—special forces. The operation was to invade Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula by force of arms. In February 2014, there is a very dramatic confrontation, mostly by Ukrainian citizens, both Crimean Tatar and ethnic Ukrainian, who were supportive of their state.

They're confronted by pro-Russian constituencies and communities outside Crimea’s parliament. Russian soldiers are meanwhile surrounding the Belbek air base in Ukraine. They have no insignia. This is an implicit recognition that what they were doing was illegal, because if you're doing something legal you would wear insignia.

Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea was the first time since the end of World War II that one European country seized another European country's territory by force. It was Europe's largest country seizing the territory of Europe's second-largest country. It was an empire taking back a former colony.

Russian forces take Simferopol Airport on February 28 and airlift reinforcements into Crimea. Meanwhile, on the ground, Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and civil society activists are bringing food and supplies to Ukrainian forces trapped on their bases and surrounded by Russian troops.

An NGO called KrymSOS—Crimea SOS—is scrambling to mobilize volunteers and offering foreign journalists parachuting in from Moscow who don't know Ukraine very well—certainly not Crimea very well—access to independent, real-time information on the ground.

And what happens on the ground is a slow, moving invasion that has very violent, dramatic moments that we don't see on television. Russian tanks storm through the Belbeck Air Base’s walls. They do so at night with helicopters firing on Ukrainian Navy personnel in places like Feodosia. They pull Ukrainian service personnel out of their barracks, handcuff them, and humiliate them. Two Ukrainian soldiers are killed. This is a carefully orchestrated, violent, and murderous takeover. 

The notion that somehow no blood was shed is completely false.”

One of the slogans emerging during Russia’s takeover of Crimea is Krym Nash—“Crimea is ours.” Why do Russians suddenly claim that Crimea is rightfully theirs? Have they always seen Crimea as Russian?

“As these so-called ‘little green men’  or ‘polite people’—a misnomer given the violence we saw unfold in 2014—invaded Crimea, this slogan—Krym Nash—went viral across Russia. When empires are nervous about their own legitimacy, they reinforce these really insistent claims to territory that is conquered. 

The theorist Edward Said put it best: ‘If you belong in a place, you don't need to keep saying it and showing it.’ You feel comfortable about where you are.

The Crimean Tatar Khans ruled Crimea for 340 years. The Russian czars ruled it for half that time. The claim that Crimea is, as Russians say, iskonno russkaya zemlya—eternally Russian land—is a desperate claim, designed to convince domestic audiences and the West that Crimea rightfully belongs to Russia.

The claim falls apart when we look closer.

The Crimean Tatars are a great example of why Crimea is not—and never was—‘eternally Russian.’ The Crimean Tatars lived and existed in a completely different cultural space for centuries. After Catherine's conquest, the peninsula remained overwhelmingly inhabited by Crimean Tatars. Even by the mid-19th century, they made up 80 to 85% of its population. 

When Bolshevik power arrived in Crimea, the Soviets acknowledged these cultural roots. That is why the Crimean Tatar language is on signs throughout the peninsula and why Veli İbraimov,  a Crimean Tatar, was appointed the local Soviet authority.

Only after 1944 do we see this massive demographic change through this murderous ethnic cleansing. This claim of being Russian comes at the cost of real human lives.”

While Russians declare “Crimea is ours,” you’ve noted that Crimean Tatars say “Crimea is us.” How does that distinction shape the history of Crimea?

“Crimean Tatars are often portrayed as pawns in a geopolitical chess game over Crimea and the Black Sea region. They're actually a prime mover. 

Predominantly Sunni Muslim and Turkic-speaking, the Crimean Tatars are recognized as one of Ukraine’s indigenous peoples, alongside Krymchaks and Qara’im. 

For them, Crimea is not a territory that they can take and possess, along the lines of what Krym Nash says. It's part of their collective consciousness. Territory and identity are intimately connected. Their cultural, spiritual, and political heritage is deeply rooted in the peninsula—a place linked to the Muslim world and Ottoman political history.

As far back as the 18th century, Crimean Tatars actively resisted Russian imperial power. One of the most powerful moments I encountered in my research was reading about Crimean Tatars who turned their backs on Catherine's famous procession to Crimea in 1787. Not often do we see moments like that recorded in documents: when colonized peoples refuse to acknowledge, defiantly, the authority of those who have conquered them.

While there is a steady resistance to czarist successes, there are also the czars who recognize the importance of the Crimean Tatars to the life of the peninsula. 

The vineyards and tobacco fields are key to the peninsula's economy. Over the generations, the Crimean Tatars have developed expertise in cultivating these crops and keeping the economy thriving. They are of use to the czars up until the Crimean War  in the 19th century, when the czars feel they could begin to displace them forcibly.

The 20th century, however, marked the Crimean Tatars’ most extraordinary chapter of resistance. Following Stalin’s 1944 displacement of the entire population—an act of ethnic cleansing—they led the most sustained and well-organized dissident movement in Soviet history.

Reading the works of ‘dissidents’ in the Soviet Union makes abundantly clear that they learned from the Crimean Tatars and duplicated their efforts in so many ways. The Crimean Tatars not only mobilized different communities to represent their interests in the Kremlin, but also spread the word about what had happened to them after 1944. So much of what we call ‘Soviet dissent’ would have been unthinkable without them.

Between 1944 and the late 1980s, Crimean Tatars never ceased in their resistance. They succeeded in persuading the Kremlin under Gorbachev  to return to their ancestral homeland, which is a remarkable feat after nearly 50 years. They began to resettle their ancestral homeland, and they resurrected the peninsula in new ways.”

How do Crimean Tatars disrupt Russia's claim about Crimea?

“Their very existence as a people with agency disrupts that story. 

The very way the Crimean Tatars are targeted by Russia's security services—on a daily basis—testifies to it. Regular raids on Crimean Tatar homes, families being pulled out of their beds at night, houses searched on the flimsiest of charges. Crimean Tatars today are treated as extremists, as terrorists. We see this happen to the Crimean Tatar Mejlis , the representative body. 

Even under Russian occupation since 2022, Crimean Tatars play Ukrainian folk songs at weddings, display certain things at home or at work in support of Ukraine. For this, they are arrested, fined, or imprisoned. Russian court records document these cases under new post-2022 legal codes, including charges of so-called ‘discrediting the Russian state.’”

Why does Russia still cling to Crimea?

“As I’ve mentioned, we can think about Crimea in two ways: first, as a hinge. Second—as a screen. 

In the first sense, Crimea has long been this hinge of Russian expansionism into Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean.

During the 19th-century Crimean War, the peninsula became a battleground where the West—the United Kingdom, France, the Ottoman Empire—halted Russia’s imperial advance. It was a military defeat for Russia. But in today’s Russia it is presented as a kind of victory.

This defeat later becomes material for the Kremlin's narratives of historical grievance and martyrdom in Russian cultural and historiographical discourse. Even now, we can see how grievances can empower certain kinds of politics that can catch people's attention. This leads Crimea to become a kind of screen upon which Russia projects its imperialist fantasies. 

Russia’s imperialist fantasies aren't only about being a great power. They're about being a great martyr. 

Crimea, to the Russian imagination, is a paradise: rocky beaches, fragrant orchards, and breathtaking mountains. But both this hinge and this screen are built on violence and obfuscation: the lies resting on the reality of Russian settler colonialism, this displacement and replacement of native populations.

Why is Crimea so important? It’s connected to this story of defeat. The siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55 is repeated in World War II, the siege of Sevastopol in 1941-42. These are moments of great suffering and defeat. It feeds a narrative of martyrdom that we can see the Putinist community pushing to the Russian populace for a very long time. It feeds their aggression. Feeds their grievance. 

Crimea today serves two purposes: it is a site of suffering and martyrdom, but it's also the projection of this image of a paradise that Russia can bring. 

The Russian state really has no other narrative other than that it is ‘great.’ The word they use is velich—greatness. For Ukraine, volia—freedom—is an important concept. For the Crimean Tatars, it's vatan—homeland. 

For Russia, greatness is somehow bound up in martyrdom and suffering and victimization that they are seeking to avenge. The villain often is the West, often the colonized peoples, Ukrainians, Georgians, Crimean Tatars, and the like. It has nothing to do with a real historical connection to Crimea, but rather with the image the Russians have of themselves.”

Crimea is often seen as a “complicated” or “lost” cause. You once said we need to “de-occupy Crimea in the Western mind.” What does it mean?

“After Russia’s annexation operation in 2014, one ‘pundit’—John Mearsheimer—declared that Crimea is ‘surely lost for good’ in the pages of the New York Times. Why? Academic malpractice. These ‘pundits’ were and are lazy. Many of them don't know Russian. They certainly don't know Ukrainian or Crimean Tatar. 

They present this ‘Crimea is surely lost for good’ defeatism as realism. But their ‘realism’ stems from a basic disrespect for the concept of Westphalian sovereignty which holds that each state, regardless of size or standing, has the right to control its own internationally recognized territory. 

If each state matters, then each state needs to be taken seriously and studied. Its languages need to be mastered. That’s hard work. Studying a complex country like Ukraine is hard work. 

Many analysts avoided it, ignored the centuries of Russian settler colonialism on the Crimean Peninsula, and disregarded the fact that, despite this settler-colonialism, a majority of residents in Crimea in 1991 voted for Ukraine's independence. They also turned a blind eye to years of studies and polls that revealed that there was no appetite for anything like Russian separatism before the annexation operation.

We play along too often. Editors and journalists in the UK and the US often want scholars and analysts to make predictions. They want them to say what will happen, not what should happen. They invite us to be fortune-tellers rather than stewards of ideas. Our information ecosystem goes crazy for these predictions. We spend too much time talking about whether Crimea will be under Ukrainian control in the future and too little time talking about whether Crimea should be under Ukrainian control in the future.

Crimea has been, since 2014, a ticking time bomb, and it's been right out in the open. It became a massive site of Russian material and cognitive militarization, and now it's this hinge of aggression. 

Crimea is a launch pad for missile and drone attacks that regularly kill civilians in mainland Ukraine. From Crimea, Russia attacks Black Sea vessels that are pivotal for global food security.

Decolonizing—de-occupying Crimea in the Western mind—is recognizing the significance of what took place in 2014. When we understand what has led us to this horrific moment now in 2025, we have to do the hard work of understanding Crimea over centuries, not just over 11 years.

What are the consequences of Russia getting to keep Crimea and having control over it?

We need to revise our ‘mental maps.’ Crimea is more than a peninsula—it is part of Ukraine’s southern steppe. The Crimean Tatar khanate, for instance, didn’t stop at the Isthmus of Perekop ; its reach extended much further into the south of Ukraine. Once you understand the deep symbiotic connection between Crimea and southern Ukraine, you begin to see why Russia was never going to stop at taking only the peninsula in 2014. Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 was in part about securing the resource and water supply from southern Ukraine to Crimea.

Russia’s invasion was, in many ways, an implicit admission: Crimea needs to be connected to the Ukrainian mainland to thrive or to survive. Once we understand that, the question about Russia potentially keeping Crimea is, historically, politically, and in terms of military security, very foolish.

Since 2022, Russia has seized or claimed key areas that connect to Crimea: Melitopol, Mariupol, and towns along the Azov Sea coast. So if we concede Crimea, we’re also conceding the territories that sustain it. Where do all these so-called concessions stop? Zaporizhzhia? Dnipro? Kyiv?

This is intellectual folly. Give away Crimea, think you're fine… that didn't happen in 2014, right? If we believe Ukraine has the right to reclaim its sovereign territory, but hesitate when it comes to Crimea—the ground zero of the very aggression that got us here—we’re not being coherent. 

Are we prepared, after all this horror, to go back to the start and call it a day, hoping for a different result? That's the definition of insanity. 

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