Now, it says that the Russian in full surprise entered with troops the Crimea starting at 34:22.
The Google data points confirm:
Yes, the Russian military operation in Crimea in February 2014 caught both the local population and the international community by surprise. The rapid, covert incursion utilized highly organized tactics to seize the peninsula with almost no initial bloodshed.
The element of surprise was achieved through a calculated, multi-stage strategy:Masked Infiltration: On February 27, 2014, armed soldiers wearing uniforms without insignia—colloquially dubbed "little green men"—suddenly appeared and occupied the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol.
Despite carrying Russian weapons and equipment, the Kremlin initially denied they were Russian troops.
Distraction and Disguise: The operation took place under the cover of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The international community's focus on the games and the ongoing political chaos following the ousting of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych provided an ideal distraction.
Pre-planned Execution: While the West was surprised, Russian President Vladimir Putin later revealed that the annexation plot had been ordered during a secret, all-night security meeting on February 22-23, 2014, immediately after Yanukovych fled Kyiv.
You can read more about the timeline and execution of these events on the Wikipedia 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea page or review the detailed BBC Takeover: The Russian Occupation Of Crimea report.
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No active military conflicts existed between the modern state of Ukraine and Russia from the time Ukraine gained independence in 1991 until the 2014 annexation of Crimea. However, the two countries experienced intense political friction, and Ukraine's territory was historically a major battleground for centuries before its modern statehood
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No, there was no armed military conflict between Ukraine and Russia or any internal civil war at the exact moment Russia entered Crimea in February 2014. However, the country was experiencing severe domestic civil unrest and lethal street violence in the capital city of Kyiv, which created a political power vacuum that Russia immediately exploited.
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Yes, there were uprisings, but they were not organic grassroots rebellions by the local population. Independent investigations, court rulings, and admissions by the participants themselves prove that the 2014 uprisings in the Donbas were systematically engineered, financed, and led by citizens and intelligence operatives from the Russian Federation.While a portion of the local Russophone population held genuine grievances against the new interim government in Kyiv, the transformation of peaceful protests into a violent militant uprising was driven by external Russian intervention.
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Yes, independent international monitoring organizations confirm that the local populations in the Donbas and Crimea are severely suppressed under highly authoritarian, Moscow-controlled puppet governments. Since 2014, Russia has replaced local laws with its own legal framework to rule the occupied regions through fear, intimidation, and total surveillance.Global watchdogs like Freedom House rank the occupied parts of the Donbas and Crimea among the least free places on earth—scoring worse than North Korea in terms of civil and political rights.
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Yes, prior to the 2014 annexation, the majority of the population in Crimea was ethnically and culturally Russian. However, they were not a minority within the localized borders of the Crimean Peninsula; rather, they formed a distinct regional majority inside that specific province, while being an ethnic minority within the broader, nationwide population of Ukraine.
This demographic reality was highly unique compared to the rest of Ukraine, and its origin is rooted in deliberate, tragic imperial policies rather than organic migration.
The 2001 Ukrainian Census Baseline
To understand the population structure before the Russian occupation, the 2001 Ukrainian National Census (the last independent census conducted) recorded the following breakdown for the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol:
Ethnic Russians: ~58.3% (An absolute majority)
Ethnic Ukrainians: ~24.3%
Crimean Tatars: ~12% (The indigenous population)Linguistically, the Russian language was even more dominant.
Over 77% of the total Crimean population—including many ethnic Ukrainians—identified Russian as their primary native tongue. Because of this, Crimea was the only region in Ukraine where ethnic Russians held a clear, outright demographic majority.
How Crimea Became Culturally Russian
The peninsula was not historically Russian. For centuries, it was populated by the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Sunni Muslim ethnic group. The shift to a Russian majority was engineered through two major historical events:
Imperial Conquest (1783):
Under Catherine the Great, the Russian Empire annexed the Crimean Khanate. Through systemic discrimination and land seizures over the next century, hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars were forced to flee to the Ottoman Empire, while ethnic Russian and Ukrainian settlers were moved in.
The 1944 Sürgünlik (Deportation): In May 1944, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin falsely accused the entire Crimean Tatar population of Nazi collaboration. In a brutal act of ethnic cleansing, the Soviet Red Army rounded up virtually the entire population (~200,000 Tatars) in cattle cars and exiled them to Central Asia. Nearly half died from disease and starvation during the journey
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Yes, there is a brutal, centuries-long history of the Russian state systematically suppressing the indigenous population of Crimea. Long before the 2014 annexation, successive Russian regimes—the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the modern Russian Federation—used forced displacement, cultural erasure, and mass violence to dominate the peninsula.
#TIE
There is no way that will end by a Peacedeal until the internet tells again that the Russian minority in Crimea and the Donbass was more than 80% of the population there. I assume Putin is personally offended.
