Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 followed decades of work to assert control over Crimea and Donbas. The playbook will be used again.
Long before tanks crossed borders, Russia was laying the groundwork to weaken Ukrainian sovereignty and build pro-Russian sentiment in Donbas and Crimea.
Russia’s attempts to reassert its influence in Crimea date back to the early 1990s. In January 1991, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, a referendum resulted in the restoration of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) within the Ukrainian SSR. While many local organizers hoped this would lead to Crimea becoming a separate Soviet republic, the Ukrainian SSR instead made it an autonomous region within post-Soviet Ukraine.
Tensions over Crimea escalated almost immediately after Ukraine’s popular vote for independence in 1991 (Some 92% of Ukrainians endorsed this, although the figure was little more than 50% in Crimea.) Regardless, the Russian political elite never fully accepted the end of Moscow’s rule, first imposed by Catherine the Great, who seized it from the Ottomans in the late 18th century.
From 1992–1994, Russia resisted Ukraine’s efforts to bring the Black Sea Fleet under its control, engaging in espionage, psychological operations, and even military provocations. Moscow also began distributing Russian passports to military personnel and running anti-Ukrainian propaganda campaigns in Crimea.
In 1994, the Crimean “president” Yuriy Meshkov called for Crimea to join Russia, and Ukraine responded by deploying about 60,000 troops from the National Guard and border services to the peninsula. The situation was stabilized, and in 1995 Ukraine abolished the Crimean constitution and presidency. Crimea’s legal status was reaffirmed in the Ukrainian Constitution in 1996 and in the Constitution of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea two years later.
Despite legal reintegration, Moscow continued to undermine a status quo that it had formally accepted — the sovereignty of Ukraine as a state within its 1990 borders. It fixed upon the demographics of the peninsula.
By 2014, Crimea was the only region in Ukraine where Russian-speakers were an absolute majority (around 60%), and where Russian was the dominant language in education, the media, and daily life. Ukrainian-language education was severely limited, with only seven schools teaching in Ukrainian and 89.4% of Crimean students taught in Russian. Only 11 pre-school institutions were Ukrainian-speaking, and just one taught in Crimean Tatar. Only two of the 26 Crimean universities trained teachers in Crimean Tatar language and literature.
More than 80% of newspapers and magazines were in Russian, and the only fully Ukrainian-language newspaper, Krymska Svitlytsia, was state-funded. Just 7% of programming on state television was in Crimean Tatar, a true indigenous language, as Russia built a parallel identity long before its “little green men” appeared on the peninsula in 2014.
After annexation, the repression of Crimean Tatars intensified. Their leaders were exiled or imprisoned, and their representative body — the Mejlis — was banned, while Crimean Tatar media outlets like ATR were shut down or forced to relocate elsewhere in Ukraine. Russian authorities also restricted religious practices, arrested activists, and conducted house raids, portraying ordinary Tatars as extremists or terrorists.
The targeting of the Crimean Tatar population was not incidental; it was part of a broader strategy to erase Ukrainian and non-Russian identities on the peninsula. A historically persecuted Muslim minority, deported by Stalin in 1944 and only allowed to return in the late Soviet period, Crimean Tatars have always overwhelmingly opposed Russian rule.
A similar long game unfolded in Donbas. Demographically, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions had large Russian-speaking populations, but remained politically and culturally embedded within Ukraine. In the 1991 independence referendum, 83.9% of voters in Donetsk and Luhansk supported Ukrainian independence — the same level of support as in Odesa and Kharkiv. It’s true some Russian-speaking Ukrainians supported the Kremlin’s campaigns, but it is wrong to read that as widespread, and worth noting many native Russian speakers now refuse to use their mother tongue.
Donbas played a central role in post-Soviet Ukrainian politics. In the 2000s, it was the stronghold of the Party of the Regions, a political force that won parliamentary majorities in 2006, 2007, and 2012, and produced President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010. Far from being an oppressed region, Donbas held disproportionate influence over Ukrainian political life.
Russia steadily worked to sow division. In the Soviet censuses, the proportion of Ukrainians in Donetsk declined steadily, from 61.6% in 1926 to 50.75% in 1989, while the Russian share rose from 24.67% to 43.65%. Russian-language education predominated, and in Donetsk by the early 1990s there were 74 Russian-language schools, 56 bilingual schools, and just 20 that taught in Ukrainian.
Media consumption followed a similar pattern. As late as 2014, 71% of people in Donetsk received their news from Russian television. After the start of the war in 2014, this dropped dramatically — to 14% in 2015 — showing how quickly trust in Russian narratives could collapse when confronted with military aggression.
After 2014, Russian propaganda adapted. Inside the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics,” Russian-backed authorities constructed an information space that mimicked Russian state media in content and tone.
As Ukrainian outlets were banned or pushed underground, Kremlin-controlled channels flooded the airwaves with narratives portraying Ukraine as a fascist state controlled by NATO. Terms like “junta,” “genocide of Russian speakers,” and “liberation mission” became fixtures among local media.
Russia not only armed the separatists, it also gave them a storyline, complete with historical revisionism and existential-threat narratives designed to create fear, loyalty, and dependency.
Outside these regions, Russian disinformation also targeted Western audiences. Through outlets like RT and Sputnik, amplified on social media, the Kremlin sought to confuse public opinion about events in Ukraine, undermining support for sanctions, and depicting the conflict as a “civil war” rather than a foreign intervention.
The story of these regions is not one of spontaneous uprisings or organic separatism, but of long-term, calculated Russian influence operations. Through forced passportization, re-education, media domination, and political manipulation, Russia sought to rewire regional identities and prepare the ground for eventual annexation or destabilization.
This long-term influence campaign continues to shape global diplomatic responses. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy firmly rejected US suggestions that a peace deal should recognize Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea and was rebuked by US President Donald Trump, who said Crimea had been “lost years ago” and was “not even a point of discussion.” The Kremlin quickly endorsed the statement, with spokesperson Dmitry Peskov saying it aligned with Russia’s long-standing position.
European leaders, however, have drawn a red line. Western officials say they would not support any US recognition of Crimea as Russian or pressure Kyiv to accept such a settlement. To do so, European diplomats argued, would destroy the rules-based international order that has preserved peace in Europe for generations.
Zelenskyy welcomed their opposition to giving up the peninsula. “Only the Ukrainian people have the right to decide which territories are Ukrainian,” he said. “The Constitution of Ukraine states that all temporarily occupied territories are temporarily occupied, and they all belong to Ukraine, to the Ukrainian people.”
Crimea and Donbas were not “lost,” they were targeted. Russia’s success in 2014 was not due to sudden revolution, but to decades of soft power, disinformation, and political maneuvering. As Ukraine continues to resist full-scale invasion, understanding how Russia built its influence is essential for countering it — and stopping similar tactics being used elsewhere.
Kateryna Odarchenko for CEPA