S35 · E06

Ukraine-Russia: the Crimea issue

With its location in the heart of the Black Sea and its quasi-Mediterranean climate, Crimea has always attracted covetousness. Greeks, Byzantines, Genoese, Mongols, Tatars and Russians have successively taken an interest in it. Since the 18th century, to its great misfortune, the peninsula has been tossed between Ukraine and Russia, at the whim of wars and changes of regime... It was there, in Crimea, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine really began in 2014, at the time of the illegal annexation of the peninsula by Vladimir Putin. Crimea, a strategic region because it allows control of the Sea of ​​Azov and offers an opening onto the Black Sea. But now also a highly symbolic territory, for Russians as well as Ukrainians: proof of the power regained for Moscow; symbol of the violation of its territorial sovereignty for kyiv from 2014, before the even more massive invasion of Russia in 2022.