March 2014: Russian forces seize Ukraine's Perevalne military base, Crimea. CC BY-SA 3.0 Anton Goloborodko / Flickr. Some rights reserved.In the three years since the annexation of Crimea, a consensus has emerged in Russia — everything that concerns the Ukrainian peninsula should be considered a Russian domestic matter, and by no means the most important on the agenda.
The “unification” of Crimea with Russia has been successfully carried out in the minds of the Kremlin’s opponents, too. In November 2016, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in a Facebook dispute with Crimean Tatar journalist Ayder Muzhdabayev, set out his position on the annexation. It was one shared widely by many liberally-minded Russian public figures, activists and intellectuals — namely that Russian society has more pressing problems to deal with, and that the opposition’s main goal must be to push for a change of power. Returning Crimea to Ukrainian jurisdiction is impossible, they argue, because public opinion would be against it. By way of illustration, Alexei Navalny’s presidential programme does not mention Crimea once.
Even those Russian media outlets that are generally considered ‘liberal” (they usually dislike the term “oppositional”) have also accepted Crimea’s annexation — as well as most of the rhetoric that came with it — without much of a fuss. The Dozhd TV channel, RBK (even before changes to its editorial staff) and Meduza, which is based in Latvia and not subject to Russian law, all routinely refer to Crimea as Russian territory. They usually argue that this is required by Russian law, and that failing to do so is fraught with strict penalties. But this sounds like an excuse — after all, the law doesn’t require Meduza to include Crimea in its online knowledge test of Russia’s cities (though this was changed after public criticism), nor to call the annexation an act of “reunification” (although such references have also been amended).
