The New Yorker:

Afew days before Sunday’s election in Russia, I travelled to Crimea, crossing the border from the Ukrainian mainland and drove to Sevastopol, a famed port city and the home of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet. Sevastopol suffered heavy losses during the Soviet campaign in the Second World War, and this military history led to a particularly strong bond with Russia. In the spring of 2014, when the Kremlin organized a referendum in Crimea and moved to annex the territory, it proved easy for Moscow to turn those sentiments into something acute and decisive.

On March 18, 2014, after a rousing and bellicose speech from Vladimir Putin, Russia’s parliament formally ratified the annexation of Crimea. On Sunday, exactly four years later, Russia held its first Presidential election since the announcement. The timing was no accident: the Kremlin’s political strategists had hoped that holding the vote on the anniversary of the annexation, which is still popular in Russia, would boost voter turnout. (Putin’s victory was preordained; the Kremlin’s main fear was that voters would be so uninterested in the election that they would simply stay home.) It was also a fitting coda to Putin’s “Crimean” period, which began in 2012, when Russia unambiguously declared that it no longer wanted to accommodate Western values but to confound and undermine them.

Go to link