Just over two years have passed since Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Since then, the peninsula has remained in international limbo and has become something of an information vacuum for outside observers.
Yet before the Ukrainian crisis began in late 2013, there was a lack of information and deep understanding not just of Crimea, but of Ukraine as a whole.
In the wake of the 2012 UEFA football championship, held across Ukraine and Poland, Rory Finnin, a Cambridge academic and expert on Ukraine, described the country as Europe’s terra malecognita. Finnin emphasised how poorly Ukraine was understood in the continent’s west. This lack of understanding is even more pertinent regarding Crimea, as a periphery within a periphery, and a place which is only becoming more isolated since Russian annexation.
