Why both Putin and Trump are so focused on Crimea

All the US president cares about is this war being over, no matter how terrible the cost to Ukraine’s history and future

- SAM KILEY WORLD

Crimea is footnoted in British history for Cardigan and the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade. To Vladimir Putin it's where history itself must turn.

Donald Trump, taking an 18th-century approach as a might-isrighter, has said that the peninsula was captured without a fight by Russia from Ukraine and therefore should stay in Putin’s fist. Of all the 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory taken after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and launched its wider Anschluss in 2022, Crimea is the greatest Russian prize.

Whoever controls Sevastopol is likely to dominate the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Outside of Tartus, in Syria, which Russia lost recently, it is – or was – Russia’s only warm-weather port.

Moscow’s claim to it has been undermined by the fact that it was ceded to Ukraine under the Soviet Union in 1954. The claim, now enshrined in an illegal annexation of Crimea into the Russian Federation, is further underpinned by waves of Russian settlement and forced removal of local people over at least two centuries that have left it with a Tartar heritage but a Russian ethnic and linguistic majority.