On 27 February 2014, masked soldiers without insignia seized the Crimean parliament in Simferopol. By 18 March, Moscow had declared the peninsula part of the Russian Federation, after a referendum staged under military occupation.
Crimea: Broken Treaties and Occupation
That referendum violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. In that agreement, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom pledged to respect Ukraine’s existing borders, a promise made after Kyiv transferred its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal to Russia. Russia also breached its 1997 Treaty on Friendship with Ukraine.
The 2003 border treaty was broken too, and both documents recognized Crimea as Ukrainian territory. The annexation handed Russia control of Sevastopol’s deep-water naval base. It also brought in roughly 900,000 additional residents. At the same time, thousands of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars who opposed the occupation were displaced.
MH17: Tracing the Buk
On July 17, 2014, a Buk surface-to-air missile struck Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 near Hrabove in eastern Ukraine. All 298 people on board were killed. The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team later traced the launcher to Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Brigade, based in Kursk.
They reconstructed its route across the border the day of the shootdown. The same brigade’s vehicles appear in Russian state media footage from earlier that summer. One Buk shows distinctive damage, serial markings, and transport rail numbers. In November 2022, a Dutch court convicted two Russians and one Ukrainian separatist for murder. The European Court of Human Rights is now examining whether Moscow itself bears state responsibility.
The Kremlin continues to deny involvement, calling the prosecution politically motivated.
Novichok on British Soil
On 4 March 2018, former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia collapsed on a park bench in Salisbury after contact with Novichok A-234, a binary nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union’s secret Foliant program. British investigators traced the poison to a perfume bottle thrown into a donation bin.
Weeks later, Dawn Sturgess died after spraying the same substance on her wrists. The UK expelled 23 Russian intelligence officers; in response, 28 countries and NATO ejected more than 150 Russian diplomats, the largest coordinated expulsion since the Cold War.
Navalny: Poison and Admission
On 20 August 2020, Alexei Navalny fell ill aboard a Tomsk to Moscow flight after drinking tea at the airport. German doctors later confirmed poisoning by a Novichok-class nerve agent. Bellingcat and its partners identified the FSB operatives who had shadowed Navalny since at least 2017, including Oleg Tayakin and Alexei Alexandrov, and exposed a dedicated FSB criminalistics unit in Moscow.
A phone call Navalny made to Konstantin Kudryavtsev, an operative, extracted an admission that the poison had been placed in Navalny’s underwear. The Kremlin denied involvement and refused to open a criminal investigation.
The 2022 Invasion and the UN Vote
On February 24, 2022, Russian forces crossed Ukraine’s borders from Belarus, Crimea, and Russian-held Donbas. Within the first hours, they struck Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Kherson. Three days later, the UN Security Council voted 11 to 1 to demand withdrawal. Russia’s veto blocked the measure.
The General Assembly then took up Resolution ES-11/1 on March 2, a text titled “Aggression against Ukraine.” It condemned Moscow’s “special military operation” in the strongest terms. It demanded an immediate ceasefire. It also affirmed Ukraine’s sovereignty within its 1991 borders.
- 141 member states voted yes.
- Voting no were Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Syria, and Russia.
- China, India, and South Africa abstained, along with 32 others.
