OCT 2014 Crimea Crisis: February-March 2014 TRADOC G-2 Intelligence Support Activity (TRISA) Complex Operational Environment and Threat Integration Directorate (CTID) [Type the author name] United States Army 6/1/2012 TRISA-CTID Threat Report Purpose • To give a historical/strategic overview of the tensions between Ukraine and Russia. • To attempt to explain the language difference between eastern Ukraine and the rest of the nation and the schism it may cause within the country. • To give details of the strong position that Russia holds over Ukraine and many other Western European countries due to their reliance on Russian hydrocarbon products for energy. • To report to the Army training community the major activities the Russians performed to take total control of Crimea in less than four weeks. • To provide an operational overview of which military and civilian facilities the Russians targeted and in what order. • To detail tactics the Russians used to capture the last Ukrainian ship in the Sevastopol Naval Base. • To provide a timeline of Ukraine-Russia relations from historical times to August 2014. Executive Summary • Ukraine and Russia, despite relatively good relations during their mutual communist era, have had high-level political disagreements over energy and Ukraine’s flirtations with the West. • Ukraine is heavily dependent upon Russia for natural gas and Russia historically attempts to leverage that dependency to force political concessions. Much of the Russian natural gas consumed by Western Europe flows through pipelines that pass through Ukraine. Any economic sanctions placed on Russia by the West may boomerang if Russia chooses to stop the export of fossil fuels to Western Europe. • Language plays a major role in the cultural identity of a group of people. More students in eastern Ukraine receive classroom instruction in the Russian language than those in the western two-thirds of the country, who primarily learn in the Ukrainian language. • A combination of previously stationed Russian troops, highly trained airborne units, naval infantry and Spetsnaz (Russian special forces) personnel from the Central and Western Military Districts, along with pro-Russian local defense forces took control of Crimea in less than a month. • The Russian/local self-defense forces captured a Ukrainian ship using a combination of information warfare, psychological operations, and military action. Cover Photo: Armed soldiers without any identifiable unit markings provide security outside the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol, 1 March 2014. Photo by by Sebastian Meyer, Voice of America website via Wikipedia Commons. 2 UNCLASSIFIED TRISA-CTID Threat Report Introduction In less than a week after the pro-European protesters forced the resignation of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych on 21 February 2014, and his subsequent hasty exodus to eastern Ukraine or Russia the following day, a large number of then-unidentified military personnel with support from local “self- defense” groups began to take control of strategic civilian and military facilities in the Crimean Peninsula. In early March 2014, multiple media sources reported these unidentified soldiers—most likely Russian troops—had taken control of Crimea. Over the next three weeks these organized units, with local militia assistance, took control of 189 Ukrainian military facilities and most of the Ukrainian naval fleet, and forced the Ukrainian military to leave Crimea for the mainland. Even more dramatically, the Russians did it with a slightly fewer military personnel on the peninsula than the Ukrainians had stationed there and with low casualty figures on both sides. The Russians used a combination of psychological operations, information warfare, coercion, bribery, naval and land blockades, and a limited amount of overwhelming force.1 This report will examine the events in Crimea from late February to early March 2014 in three respects. The first is the historical/strategic level, which will examine occasional strained relations between Figure 1. Ukraine in relationship to the rest of Europe. Crimea is Russia and Ukraine along with the small peninsula south of the Ukraine mainland. the importance of Russian natural gas for Ukraine and other Western European countries. The second section will deal with the actions taken by the invading forces that targeted specific civilian and military facilities in order to achieve rapid success. The final section focuses on how the attackers seized the last remaining Ukrainian warship in the Sevastopol Naval Base with only limited casualties on both sides. 3 UNCLASSIFIED TRISA-CTID Threat Report Figure 2. Ukraine with its major cities Historical/Strategic Overview Historically, Russia has often attempted to dominate Ukraine and the two countries have usually found themselves at odds with each other. In 1667, the Ukrainians found their traditional homeland divided between Poland and Russia. In 1793 during the second partition of Poland by Prussia and Russia, most of modern-day Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire. With the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Central Rada (Council) declared Ukraine’s independence in Kyiv. Over the next four years, various political blocs fought a civil war in Ukraine for control of the country. In 1921, the communist forces with support from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) took control of the eastern two- thirds of the country and proclaimed that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic now belonged to the USSR.2 Ukraine found itself well integrated into the Russian Empire as part of the Pan-Slavic movement, but became discontent with communism, collective farming, and the great starvation. In the early 1930s, approximately seven million Ukrainian peasants died due to Premier Joseph Stalin’s collectivization plans. Stalin forced the relocation of millions of other Ukrainians to Siberia for their political views, as well as 200,000 ethnic Tatars from Crimea for their support of the Nazis during World War II. In 1941, when Hitler decided to attack the USSR, many Ukrainians cheered because the people believed the Germans would be Ukraine’s liberators. The native population, however, soon found the Nazis just as unpalatable as the Soviets, and about five million Ukrainians died fighting the Germans. When Soviet troops liberated Kyiv from the Nazis in November 1943, Stalin then attempted to “Russify” the country by eliminating use of the Ukrainian language in schools, the courts, and government. The communists thought that one culture—Russian—would better serve to unify the USSR. In 1945, the Soviet Union 4 UNCLASSIFIED TRISA-CTID Threat Report formally re-assimilated the western part of Ukraine. In a surprising move less than a decade later, however, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev “gave” Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR.3 While the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine was thought of as an administrative move as the Soviet Union never foresaw its own demise, Crimea was always part of Russia dating back several hundred years. From the Russian perspective, the transfer of the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine was a mistake of Khrushchev, communism, or just history. Crimea is much different than the rest of Ukraine as many Russian retirees, especially from the Russian Navy, live in Crimea. On 6 July 1990, with the end of the Soviet Union, Ukraine proclaimed its independence. On 1 December 1991, over 93% of Ukrainian citizens voted for independence and chose former communist Leonid Krawchuk as their first president. On 10 July 1994, Leonid Kuchma—former director of a Soviet rocket factory—defeated the incumbent to become Ukraine’s second president. During Kuchma’s decade in power, the Ukrainian air force accidently shot down a Russian civilian airplane over the Black Sea during a joint Russian-Ukrainian air defense exercise in October 2001, killing all 78 people on board. The responsibility for this accident is still undetermined. On 26 December 2004, the West-leaning Viktor Yushchenko defeated the Russian-backed challenger, Viktor Yanukovych, to become the third Ukrainian president. Yanukovych served twice as Ukraine’s Prime Minister before winning election on 25 February 2010 to become the country’s fourth president. Political alliances cemented during Yanukovych’s previous tenure as Donetsk’s provincial governor helped him garner Russian backing; in return, he frequently supported Russian political positions in parliament.4 Language Barrier between Eastern and Western Ukraine The Soviet policy of eliminating the local language negatively affected Ukraine, especially in the eastern part of the country. The farther west one travels in Ukraine, the more Ukrainian is spoken. Ukrainian is the language taught in western Ukrainian schools, as well as the native tongue spoken by most locals. A quick glance at Figure 3 on the next page demonstrates that Ukraine is a country divided by its language, a reality that fuels cultural divisions as well. Except for Zakarpattia province in the far southwestern corner of the Figure 3. Percent of Ukrainians who use Ukrainian as their primary country and Odessa in the educational language south-central region, at least 5 UNCLASSIFIED TRISA-CTID Threat Report 90% all people in the provinces in the western two-thirds of the country use Ukrainian as the primary instructional language in their schools (percentages in green text in Figure 3). In six provinces, including the two already mentioned, approximately 70% to 84% of the students are taught in the Ukrainian