By Olha Hembik | 2026-03-18

The official version of Crimea's annexation has always been tidy: a referendum, a signing ceremony, a done deal. What the people who were actually there witnessed does not fit that frame.

Twelve years on, journalists and rights activists are filling in what the neat account leaves out and what it was designed to make the world forget.

A planned military operation

Russia's special operation to seize Crimea began three days before the close of the Sochi Winter Olympics, which ran February 7-23, 2014, according to Andrii Klymenko, projects director of the Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies.

Klymenko, who was on the peninsula when government and parliament buildings were seized, said Sevastopol served as the starting point because Russia's Black Sea Fleet headquarters were based there under an agreement with Ukraine.

Russian military equipment and armed men in uniforms without insignia, dubbed "little green men," descended on the peninsula, blocking the Crimean parliament, the Kerch Strait ferry line and strategic facilities.

The operation was planned well in advance. Medals produced in Russia and awarded to participants bear an inscription on the back: "For the return of Crimea, 02/20/14–03/18/14."

Olha Skripnik, head of the Crimean Human Rights Group and co-coordinator of Euromaidan in Yalta, said Russian attacks on Ukrainian military units preceded the vote. The pressure was personal as well as military.

"Overnight on March 16 one of the last Ukrainian military units was attacked. Military intelligence officials told me they were giving me one last day to leave Crimea, and they threatened me saying that if I didn't leave, no one would ever find me again," Skripnik told Kontur.

Protests, abductions, torture

Crimeans did not go quietly. Tamila Tasheva, a rights activist and permanent representative of the president of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, said protests against the occupation were held across the peninsula.

"People gathered in many cities and villages of Crimea to stand up for Ukraine's territorial integrity. On March 14 there was a Crimea-wide demonstration in support of Ukraine, and [Crimeans] formed human chains," Tasheva told Kontur.

Crimean Tatar leaders understood immediately what Russian rule would mean.

"Crimean Tatars have an excellent historical memory, and they know exactly who carried out the genocide against them and who colonized Crimea's territory for centuries," Tasheva said. Their clear position in support of Ukraine, she added, brought punishment from the first days of occupation.

Repression came swiftly. Mykola Shiptur, described as the first Crimean political prisoner, was arrested in Sevastopol.

On March 3, Reshat Ametov was abducted during a one-person protest in Simferopol and killed; his body was found March 15. People were also arrested at demonstrations marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko on March 9.

That same day, Andriy Shchekun, editor of the newspaper Krymska Svitlytsia and a leader of the Euromaidan-Crimea movement, was seized at a train station along with activist Anatoliy Kovalskiy, head of the board of a Ukrainian school in Simferopol. The two had come to receive Ukrainian national symbols for Shevchenko's birthday. Men they did not know attacked them on the platform, broke their arms and dragged them to a police station.

"They threw us into a car, beat us again, and then taped our hands together and put tape over our eyes," Shchekun told Kontur.

The men were taken to the basement of the Simferopol draft bureau, where they were tortured, subjected to electric shocks and shot with a pneumatic weapon.

"There were around 40 people in the basement. There were activists and Ukrainian soldiers. They cut one guy's ear off because they had decided he belonged to the Right Sector nationalist group," Shchekun said.

Shchekun and Kovalskiy were not released until March 20. Doctors later removed two bullets from Shchekun's arm.

A referendum at gunpoint

On the morning of March 16, 2014, Russia held its so-called referendum. Voters faced two questions: support reunification with Russia, or support restoring Crimea's 1992 constitution and remaining part of Ukraine. Any single mark counted as a yes; two marks invalidated the ballot.

"It was a referendum at gunpoint," Skripnik said, describing armed military personnel and intelligence officers stationed throughout Yalta's polling places.

Ukrainian television channels had already been shut down and replaced with Russian propaganda, she added.

Serhiy Zayets, an expert at the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union and co-author of the report "Crimean Precedent: Imitation of Democracy," said the procedure echoed historical precedents.

"This procedure was used in Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, and during the occupation of Northern Cyprus in 1974," he told Kontur. "What did [Russia's President Vladimir] Putin do? He imitated historical precedents when there was an attempt to use a referendum to legalize the seizure of territory."

Zayets pointed out that according to international law, the presence in a country of another state's troops makes it impossible for the population to express its will, so foreign observers ignore a plebiscite that takes place under such circumstances.

The majority of Crimean Tatars and pro-Ukraine residents boycotted the vote.

Tasheva said the referendum had no legal basis given Russia's military presence as an aggressor state. Most of the world's countries declined to recognize the results. The referendum nonetheless marked the formal beginning of Russia's open occupation of the peninsula -- the tidy conclusion to an operation that, as the medals always showed, was never really in doubt.