REUNION

During an all-night meeting on February 22, Putin and his security officials discussed what was to be done with the disgraced, oafish Yanukovych. They decided to give him safe haven in Russia.

Yanukovych’s flight from Ukraine set in motion a plan that worked so smoothly that it must have been made long in advance. On February 23 there were pro-Russian demonstrations in the Crimean city of Sevastopol. On February 27 “polite little green men,” soldiers in unmarked uniforms and masks, appeared on the peninsula, seizing the Crimean parliament building and other state structures. (As an “autonomous republic” within Ukraine, Crimea had its own parliament and prime minister.) The little green men faced very little resistance from Ukrainian security forces, many of whom promptly defected to the Russian side. Crimea’s occupied parliament dissolved the sitting government and replaced Crimea’s prime minister with a member of Crimea’s Russian Unity party.

The little green men were happy to pose for photos with children and pretty girls, but they refused to explain where they’d come from, saying only, “We’re simply trying to prevent violence.” Neat, professional, and well behaved, the little green men made a dramatic contrast with the “Crimean self-defense force,” a motley assortment of local men in camouflage, athletic wear, and Cossack costumes formed to defend the peninsula from Kiev’s new “fascist junta,” as the Russian media called it. Putin denied that the little green men were Russian soldiers, suggesting that they were Crimean self-defense forces who had bought their own uniforms. By then he was just teasing.

Russia’s strategic interest in Crimea was obvious. After Ukrainian independence, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet had remained in the port city of Sevastopol, which, with its prime military and trading position, has figured in many wars over the centuries.

IN EARLY MARCH the Crimean journalist Aleksandra Dvoretskaya took part in protests supporting the Ukrainian soldiers who were blockaded in their military quarters. The Crimean self-defense forces shoved the protesters and seized their flags and signs as the police looked on.

As the activists planned a gathering in honor of Taras Shevchenko’s birthday, March 9, two of them were arrested and handed over to Crimea’s Russian Unity party. They were held prisoner for two weeks, and one of them was shot in the arm and leg. The protesters learned that there would soon be a larger repression of local activists, and that the self-defense forces and special forces were looking for Dvoretskaya. A few days before the referendum, she got on a train to the mainland. “Every stop, every open door was torture—I thought someone was going to capture me,” she recalled in an interview with a Ukrainian publication. In Kiev, she started an organization to provide assistance to other internally displaced Ukrainians.

Dvoretskaya was a journalist, an activist, a public figure. But some ordinary people fled, too. On the night before the referendum, Natasha Abrosimenkova, who was twenty-five, decided to flee her village, Lenino. She was frightened by the armed people who had suddenly filled the streets, and she didn’t want Russian citizenship. She’d studied Ukrainian history and culture at university and attended a Russian-language secondary school with a Ukrainian curriculum. The Ukrainian government had provided social support for her three children, but the payments had stopped when the little green men took over. She and her husband had worked as traders in the local market: she sold underwear and he sold hats.

Soldiers turned many cars back from the cordon, especially trucks. They searched Natasha’s family’s car but saw that they had three children, and let them through.

For the Abrosimenkov family, the flight from Crimea meant losing almost everything. Their bank accounts were blocked. Friends and relatives rejected them, adding them to the list of personae non gratae: traitors, Nazis, Banderites.

THE CRIMEAN TATARS protested vigorously and boycotted the referendum, to no avail. Crimea’s new government claimed that it planned to treat the Tatars well, but many Tatars fled the peninsula, remembering Stalin’s mass deportation. Their leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, left Crimea to attempt to meet with U.S. vice president Joseph Biden; he was refused reentry. Thousands of Crimean Tatars went to the border crossing point to meet Dzhemilev, breaking through lines of Russian troops and saying that they would return to Crimea only if Dzhemilev was with them. But the Crimean Tatars had been written out of the new narrative of Crimea. Their small-scale occupations of land and property, their protests and half-built shacks were dwarfed by Russia’s overnight occupation of the entire peninsula. Crimea’s acting prime minister, Sergei Aksyonov, said that any Tatars who were displeased with the new situation should leave if they didn’t like it; many followed his advice. Authorities banned the Tatars’ annual commemoration of their 1944 deportation.

THE TATARS, and people like Dvoretskaya and Abrosimenkova, were in the minority. Official reports of 83 percent turnout for the referendum, with 97 percent voting to join Russia, were certainly exaggerated. But many Crimeans truly did want to become Russian—or rather, to return to the Soviet Union, the country in which many of them had been born. They hoped to be rescued from the uncertainty of post-Maidan Ukraine, to receive higher pensions, and to exit a nation in which they’d never really been at home.

The Crimean government had supported Yanukovych from the beginning of the Euromaidan protests. Many Crimeans watched Russian television, which whipped them into a frenzy of fear over the “fascist” Maidan movement. Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the ultranationalist coalition Right Sector, was Russia’s favorite bogeyman; though Right Sector remained a fringe group, the Russian media made it sound like the Fourth Reich. The Ukrainian government gave plenty of fodder to the Russian propaganda machine, too. In February 2014 the Ukrainian parliament had voted to cancel a 2012 law that allowed for official bilingualism (Russian and Ukrainian) in regions in which more than 10 percent of the population identified as Russian. Interim President Turchynov refused to sign the bill, but the damage was done. Many Russian-speaking Ukrainians became convinced that the post-Maidan government planned to strip them of their rights.

YAROSLAV PILUNSKIY, a cameraman in his late thirties, had filmed the Maidan protests as part of a documentary filmmaking collective called Babylon ’13, which formed, in Pilunskiy’s words, to “help in the information war.” Many members were people from the student movement of the 1990s, the sorts of people who’d participated in the Orange Revolution.

Yaroslav was born in Crimea, in Simferopol. At the time of the referendum his father was still a deputy in the Crimean parliament, a vocal advocate for Ukrainian unity. Before the referendum he appeared on live Russian television, where, according to Yaroslav, “they cut him off because he was telling the truth.” People on the street called him a traitor.

Yaroslav and Yura were trying to film surreptitiously outside a police station when the self-defense patrol, a group of Crimeans with automatic weapons who’d been assigned to guard the area, caught sight of them. Yaroslav and Yura didn’t have any press accreditation; the patrolmen seized their camera and brought them in for interrogation.

“I was interrogated first,” Yaroslav told me. “We decided together that it was a misunderstanding, we hadn’t filmed anything anyway, and they’d just take our memory cards and let us go. But then they interrogated Yura, and while they were doing that, a guy came in who knew my father. He recognized me and said, ‘We need to hang on to this guy.’ Then there was a call on my cell phone. It was a comrade from Maidan who was entered in my contacts as ‘Regiment Assistant.’ And that was it—they thought we were Right Sector. We were just enemies to them.

“They cuffed our hands behind our backs, blindfolded us, and put us in a basement room that was meant for kitchen storage, with a tiled floor. There was blood splattered on the tiles. The only objects in the room were a mattress, a bottle of water, and a bottle for urine. We couldn’t hear anything. In the wall between the rooms where we were being held there was a hole, and we could see each other’s eyes—that helped. We were panicked, of course. But we had to pull ourselves together, and we did.

“After twenty-four hours a military commander came into the next cell. He was a Ukrainian who’d been detained. We whispered to each other, and I saw the fear in his eyes, even though he was a military man, ten years older than I am. He said the main thing was to survive. We wondered who’d come to interrogate us—Russians, or Cossacks with long beards, or Berkut.

“They tied my arms behind my back again, put a towel over my head, and took me into the next room. I asked them if they planned to beat me, and they said they did. I asked what for, and they said they were going to find out when Right Sector was going to show up in Crimea. I told them we should just talk, that I had nothing to hide. But they said there was only one way this could go.

“They put me in a chair and kicked me in the chest, then hit me with a pipe, put a pistol in my face. And they were asking absolutely stupid questions. I could tell they’d learned them from films or from a book. They demanded addresses, safe houses, passwords. From the beginning, they were convinced someone had sent us—some senior member of the Maidan self-defense force. They wanted to know who’d paid us. We kept insisting we didn’t represent any armed forces. I realized that the Crimean peninsula had been closed off, and a sort of collective unconsciousness had taken over.... So I talked to them and tried to make them think with their own minds. Sometimes I’d make progress and we’d start arguing—but then they’d revert, saying, ‘Fascist, Banderite,’ and so on.

“One of them said, ‘You’re my enemy. Because your camera is stronger than my weapons.’ I was in ecstasy—I wanted to applaud. It was so unreal. For them, every person with a camera is an enemy. I think it’s because they know that what they’re doing is criminal, and they’re afraid of being caught and tried for separatism, which is a crime. But when they’re in masks, in big groups, and feel protected by Russia—then they’re not afraid.

“We had a conversation—of course, in those conditions it could hardly be called a conversation, but still—and we found out we had relatives from the same place, Kamenets-Podilsk, and I found out he had two degrees from institutions of higher education—though maybe they were in physical education, I don’t know. He was very Orthodox. He looked for a cross under the neck of my shirt, and when he didn’t find one, he said, ‘Are you a Jew?’

“When he held the pistol to my head, it meant he wasn’t beating me, so I could relax a little. That was when we talked. ‘Who gave you the money?’ he asked. I told him that I’d gotten it from donations, from people on Maidan. People who want to get criminals out of power. And then he put the pistol down. He didn’t point the pistol at me anymore, he didn’t beat me anymore. When I said, ‘get criminals out of power,’ I was talking directly about him. His brain had gone on, he’d started thinking. He asked me about Right Sector, and I explained what they do, and how they weren’t going to come to Crimea, because they had their hands full in Kiev.”

Yaroslav and Yura were in the basement for six days before they were released. They were the subjects of many news stories, the first hostages in what was now an open conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

PUTIN PRESENTED RUSSIA’S ANNEXATION of Crimea as a generous response to the long-standing desire of the Crimean people to “return” to Russia, their native land. He later said that with the referendum, Crimeans had “shown that they remain true to the historic truth and our forefathers’ memory.” Putin wasn’t alone in this rhetoric of reunion. “Step by step, we have led Crimeans to realize their dream of returning home to Russia,” said the speaker of the breakaway Crimean legislature. Khrushchev’s symbolic gift of Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954, the culmination of a large-scale Russian-Ukrainian friendship campaign, was a mistake that had finally been corrected. The Russian media called the annexation “the third defense of Sevastopol,” showing shots of the battle for Crimea in the Second World War.

Putin’s annexation picked up a long-running narrative thread in Russia’s history. In April 1783, after complicated political negotiations with the Ottomans who then controlled Crimea, Catherine the Great had annexed the peninsula without firing a single shot. Russian poets interpreted this victory as a sign that Crimea was a natural extension of the Russian Empire. Gavrila Derzhavin, Russia’s greatest poet at the time, wrote,

Which god, which angel

Which friend of mankind

Crowned us with bloodless laurels,

Gave us trophies without battle?

Russia has always been worried about its origins, its authenticity. It was late to adopt Christianity, to develop a written alphabet and a literary language, to modernize. Russians imported innovation from abroad, and they suffered acute anxiety of influence. But if God had given the Russian Empire Crimea, cradle of ancient cultures, surely Russians had no need to worry about being newcomers to European civilization. By absorbing Crimea, imperial Russia was able to associate itself with the ancient world and with Christian Byzantium; by defeating the Ottoman Empire’s Muslim Turks and Tatars, it put itself on the side of Europe and Christianity rather than Asia and Islam.

The medieval Kievan Prince Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity at the Crimean city of Khersones was the foundation of Catherine and Prince Potemkin’s Greek Project: Crimea was the place where Rus had become Christian. In a letter to Catherine after the annexation of Crimea, Potemkin called Khersones “the source of our Christianity and of our very humanity.” Catherine, whom her poets called Minerva, would break pagan spells and resurrect the glorious ghosts of the peninsula, exceeding even Homer’s glory. Court poet Derzhavin wrote,

Circe howls in vexation,

All her magic reduced to nothing.

The Achaeans, turned to beasts,

Are made human again by Minerva.

Smiling, Pythagoras is amazed

To see the transmigration of souls:

Homer appears where a dragonfly had been

And with his thunderous voice,

He sings not fables, but the truth.

Catherine and Potemkin were never able to fully realize their Greek Project; there was soon another Russo-Turkish War, Potemkin died in 1791, and Catherine herself died in 1796. But the Russian scholar Andrei Zorin writes that the Greek Project “remained in Russian culture as an intention, a lost possibility, a latent—but for that all the stronger—realm of attraction.” The loss of Crimea, its ancient paradise, its creation story, haunted post-Soviet Russia; the possession of Crimea was “the crown of Russia’s historical mission, its civilizing task.” The symbolic meaning of the peninsula lingered in its rough, dry hills and ancient caves, and in the shining Black Sea, whose depths preserved the wrecks of ancient Greek ships.

Putin picked up where Potemkin had left off. In 2011, as Russian scientists excavated the ruins of an ancient Greek city off the coast of Crimea, Putin had himself filmed in a wetsuit, retrieving two broken amphorae from shallow waters nearby. It was clear to everyone that the amphorae had been planted there, just as it had been obvious to Catherine during her Crimean tour that Potemkin’s villages and Amazons were just for show. Like Catherine, Putin was staging a play that would allow him to lay claim to a history that wasn’t his own. After he’d annexed the peninsula, he echoed Potemkin, announcing that Crimea was “the spiritual source” of the Russian state, because it was in Khersones that Prince Vladimir had been baptized before bringing Christianity to Rus. This gave Crimea “invaluable civilizational and even sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.” Never mind that Vladimir was prince of Kiev, long before the modern Russian state existed.

UKRAINE’S ACTING PRESIDENT, Oleksandr Turchynov, said that Ukraine would never recognize the annexation. (For their part, many eastern and southern Ukrainians, as well as Crimeans, did not recognize Turchynov as legitimate, considering Maidan a coup.) The United States, the EU, and others condemned the annexation, which had been unconstitutional, and imposed sanctions in retaliation. There were somewhat hysterical comparisons, both inside and outside Ukraine, to Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Was Putin now willing to invade any country he pleased? Was he planning to devour Ukraine piece by piece, and then move on to the other post-Soviet states?

But no one was ready to fight Putin for Crimea. The interim Ukrainian government was in no position to wage war, with a dysfunctional army, an empty treasury, and central Kiev still covered in ashes. The U.S. and the EU would not support Ukraine in a war for Crimea.

Despite their outrage at Putin’s insolence, Ukrainians were well aware that Crimea’s integration into independent Ukraine had been an accident of history, an uneasy coupling. Crimeans were portrayed as Soviet-style freeloaders, living on summer vacation earnings and causing trouble in Ukraine’s national politics, preventing Ukraine from realizing its European (as opposed to Soviet, or Russian, or even Ottoman) destiny. Ukrainians didn’t like the annexation, but some were willing to acknowledge that it might be for the best.

AFTER THE ANNEXATION there was peace in Crimea, but there was also rampant inflation and a loss of access to banks and credit cards. That summer the seaside was nearly empty. There was talk of schemes to make Crimea into a casino paradise, or a giant military base, or some combination of the two, but Russia’s economic slump and Western sanctions put plans for a Russian Las Vegas on hold. Ukraine stopped running trains from the mainland. There were plans to build a bridge across the Strait of Kerch, to connect Russia and Crimea, but it would be hugely expensive and take years to complete.

My friend Olga and her husband Sanya continued to spend every summer on Meganom, taking a ferry from Russia now that it was no longer possible for them to drive through Ukraine. They were well aware of the bad effects of annexation on the economy, but they couldn’t help enjoying the tranquillity brought by Crimea’s new isolation. Olga told me that Meganom seemed to be cleaning itself, as if in preparation for some great event, and that she’d never seen so many stars, soaring and falling. When she went up the cliff, above the seashore, the canopy of stars was reflected in the water; it looked as if there weren’t any sea, only the starry heavens, embracing the earth.