The annexation of Crimea in March 2014 put Russia in the position of a country not fulfilling its international obligations. The international community reacted almost unanimously to this fact as to the illegal annexation of territories.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, together with Great Britain and the United States, signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, in which, in exchange for renouncing nuclear weapons, the state of Ukraine guaranteed the integrity of sovereignty within the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. The Russian military invasion organized in Crimea in February-March 2014 and the referendum held on March 16 outside international legal norms allowed the international community to recognize the annexation as illegal.
Accession or annexation?
Initially, the world community was in some shock, because in the civilized world, in the 21st century, it is no longer accepted to think in imperial categories of the annexation of territories. The civilized world is uniting and globalizing for completely different motivations, reasons and categories. That is why the first reaction of the German Chancellor was the phrase released to the world in a telephone conversation with US President Barack Obama, when she announced that Vladimir Putin had lost touch with reality and was living in some kind of fictional world of his own.
In the very first analytical publications, in particular in the newspaper The Guardian, there were arguments that Russia unilaterally decided to step on the shaky soil of a new Cold War in order to try to take revenge for the Cold War that was lost in the mid-1980s. between the Soviet Union and the West for a little over forty years, as a result of which the USSR collapsed.
The main concern of the world behind the scenes was caused by the irreversible geopolitical consequences that may follow after such a precedent. Consequences putting the world on the brink of a third world war. Many columnists of foreign publications pointed to the identity of the propaganda Russian rhetoric, which appears in justifying the reasons for the annexation of Crimea, with the rhetoric of Nazi Germany in connection with the annexation of Austria and part of Czechoslovakia before World War II.
A dry analysis of the vote on the recognition or non-recognition of the Crimean referendum held at the UN showed that most countries perceived the accession as an annexation and as a challenge posed by Russia to the entire world community. Only a few developing third world countries such as North Korea, Syria and Venezuela approved of the incident. China refrained from making any assessments of this event.
Sanctions
Since the United States, Canada and the EU countries from the very beginning came to an agreement that Russia violated the sovereignty of a neighboring country and, as a result, if it does not abandon its intentions, should be punished, the leaders of these countries came to an agreement on the imposition of political and economic sanctions, both for specific citizens of Russia and for various enterprises and companies.
The initial sanctions were of a precautionary nature and did not seriously affect the Russian economy and oligarchy, which allowed patriotic citizens to be confident in the infallibility of the policy pursued by the Russian government. But subsequent actions, aggravated by propaganda and actions against the two eastern regions of Ukraine - Luhansk and Donetsk, with the support of separatists and pro-Russian terrorists in them - led to tougher sanctions. By the end of July 2014, Russia received 3 stages of increasingly stringent sanctions in various areas. According to the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Robert Menendez, in September 2014 Russia will face the 4th stage of sanctions affecting the banking sector, as well as vetoing the supply of advanced technologies and modern energy equipment, without which it is impossible to extract the main Russian export commodity - oil and gas.
Thus, slowly but steadily, maneuvering and buying time for itself in order to avoid overturning its own economies to the brink of an energy and economic crisis, the world community is pushing Russia into a deep periphery of international interests and progressive international isolation.
As a result, according to Western economic and political analysts, in the next six months alone, the annexation of Crimea will cost Russian taxpayers several thousand billion dollars, and in the future will drive the country's economy into recession, and possibly bring the deepest economic crisis closer, as well as accelerate the collapse without that difficult situation in the industrial and social infrastructures of the country.
