Claims about the territory’s spiritual status have been revealed to be fiction.
Those concerns were perhaps understandable, insofar as Russian officials have continually rattled a nuclear saber about protecting Crimea from any Ukrainian reclamation efforts. But now, as Ukraine unleashes near-daily assaults on the peninsula, the notion that Crimea presents some kind of Temple Mount—or even any kind of red line—for Russians has crumbled.
In the face of continued drone attacks, long-range missile fires, sabotage operations, and annihilation of military assets across Crimea, Russians have hardly treated the Ukrainian peninsula as some kind of sacred land. Rather than rushing to protect Crimea, Russians have instead begun fleeing the region en masse. Rather than seeing Russians lining up to enlist to aid the Kremlin’s defense of the peninsula, Moscow continues mooting the potential of a second, and far broader, forced mobilization. And rather than resulting in any kind of nuclear conflagration, Russians’ subdued reaction to the continued bombardment of Crimea has dissolved Putin’s claims that the peninsula is some kind of special, sacrosanct land. As McGill University professor Maria Popova recently posted on X (formerly known as Twitter), “Crimea isn’t special, let alone a red line.”
Indeed, with few even noticing, Ukraine’s continued shelling and strikes on the peninsula have illustrated one clear lesson: The idea that Crimea is some kind of holy land that Russians will race to defend—an idea that far too many in the West previously swallowed—is dead. And in that death, a wealth of new opportunities has opened up for Kyiv and for the Western partners who are suddenly realizing Crimea is hardly the sacral land Putin once claimed.
More broadly, the disintegration of the notion that Crimea presents any kind of red line for Putin is of a piece with supposed Russian red lines elsewhere, all of which have likewise crumbled. And with the disappearance of this Crimean "red line"—as well the dismantling of the idea that Crimea is some kind of holy land for Russians—there is no reason remaining for Western governments not to do everything in their power to back Ukrainian efforts at retaking every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.
Russia's Crimean Red Line Has Been Erased by Ukraine
