Even Ukraine’s staunchest allies sometimes waver, tempted to suggest that Kyiv concede Crimea to Russia as the long-running war there wages on. They often fall prey to a persistent myth: that Crimea had been eternally Russian until Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev arbitrarily “gifted” the peninsula to Ukraine in 1954. Such proposals dangerously misread history.
In truth, the Kremlin handed Crimea to Ukraine not out of benevolence but because a decade of disastrous Soviet policies had left the territory an economic and humanitarian disaster. As University of Cambridge professor Rory Finnin notes, “The transfer of Crimea to Ukraine was no mistake. It was a rescue.”
During a visit to Crimea in October 1953, Khrushchev witnessed the devastation firsthand. Driving through the peninsula with his son-in-law, Aleksey Adzhubey — editor-in-chief of Izvestia and one of the Soviet Union’s most influential journalists — Khrushchev encountered not only the ruins of the Crimean Tatar Bakhchysaray Palace but also vast stretches of barren land strewn with abandoned military hardware.
Most telling were the desperate Russian settlers blocking the roads, pleading for water, sanitation, hospitals and schools. Soviet archives show that the entire region, roughly the size of Massachusetts, had only 24 bread stores, 18 meat stores, and eight milk stores. According to Adzhubey, the settlers complained bitterly: “Potatoes don’t grow here, the cabbage is withering, and the bedbugs are eating us alive.” When Khrushchev asked why they had come, they answered simply: They had been “tricked.”
This grim tableau was the result of a centuries-long pattern. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea from the Crimean Tatar Khanate in 1783, successive Russian regimes systematically eradicated indigenous populations they deemed “unreliable.” Tsar Alexander II ordered mass expulsions of Crimean Tatars in the 1850s. Stalin deported nearly 188,000 Crimean Tatars in 1944, along with approximately 90,000 Armenians, Bulgarians and Greeks. Tens of thousands died in exile. With the native agriculturalists gone, Russian settlers struggled to survive in Crimea’s harsh, unfamiliar climate.
Khrushchev understood that Crimea’s salvation depended on reconnecting it to Ukraine’s southern steppes and the life-giving Dnipro River, ties that had sustained the peninsula for millennia. Crimea had always relied on Ukrainian resources and trade, long before Russian conquest. Even during the major wars fought over Crimea — the Crimean War and World War II — ethnic Ukrainians formed the backbone of the Russian army and Black Sea Fleet.
To justify the economic necessity politically, Khrushchev and the Communist Party leadership invoked the upcoming 300th anniversary of Ukraine’s so-called “reunification” with Russia.
First, the Presidium of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic passed a resolution proposing the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR. Then the USSR’s central government — the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet — ratified the transfer on Feb.19, 1954, citing “the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity, and the close economic and cultural ties between Crimea Province and the Ukrainian SSR.”
Two months later, the Supreme Soviet amended the Soviet Constitution, officially transferring the Crimean Oblast from Russia to Ukraine. Ukraine’s Communist leadership, under pressure from Moscow, agreed to the transfer — along with the immense burden of reviving the devastated region.
Over the next decades, Ukraine poured resources into developing Crimea. In 1957, it launched the construction of the North Crimean Canal, completed in 1971, to bring water from the Dnipro River to the arid peninsula. Ukraine invested heavily in infrastructure, agriculture and tourism, building reservoirs, irrigating fields, establishing resorts and creating economic opportunities. Between 1954 and 1990, Ukraine invested close to five times more per capita in Crimea than in comparable regions elsewhere in the republic.
These efforts bore fruit. By the time of Ukraine’s 1991 independence referendum, 54 percent of Crimean voters — including 57 percent in Sevastopol — chose to remain part of an independent Ukraine. A subsequent poll by Baltic Surveys/Gallup showed 65 percent of respondents favoring Crimea’s autonomy within Ukraine, with only 23 percent preferring union with Russia.
Russia itself formally recognized Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea multiple times: through the 1991 Belovezhskaya Pushcha Accords that dissolved the USSR, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for nuclear disarmament, and the 1997 Treaty of Friendship between Ukraine and Russia.
Any proposal to force Ukraine to cede Crimea ignores overwhelming geographical, historical, legal and moral realities. Crimea’s reintegration into Ukraine is not only vital for justice but essential for long-term stability, economic prosperity and peace across the broader European region. Moreover, allowing Russia to retain Crimea would be a death knell for the Crimean Tatars — the peninsula’s indigenous people — who have already faced systemic repression, imprisonment, forced disappearances and cultural erasure under Russian occupation. Their survival as a distinct community depends on Crimea’s reintegration into a democratic Ukraine.
Ultimately, the question of Crimea is not even a matter of history but of international law. Sovereignty and territorial integrity are the cornerstones of the postwar global order. To accept Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea is to accept a world in which powerful states can erase borders by force — where might makes right, and justice becomes irrelevant. That is a world none of us can afford.
The path to sustainable peace runs through a Ukrainian Crimea — not a Russia-occupied one.
Kateryna Yushchenko was the First Lady of Ukraine from 2005 to 2010.
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