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The Beginner's Guide to Crimea: From Ancient Greeks to Modern War
Paperback
General Military HistoryRussian History
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 16 2026
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.22
Height: 0.85 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
THE BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO CRIMEA
From Ancient Greeks to Modern War
A. Humphreys
Why does a small peninsula on the northern shore of the Black Sea matter so much to the world? Why have empires fought over it for three thousand years? Why did a Russian president risk international isolation to seize it in 2014? And why does Britain - which sent its soldiers there in the 1850s and signed a solemn treaty guaranteeing its safety in 1994 - still refuse to accept what Russia has done?
The Beginner's Guide to Crimea answers all of these questions, and many more, in a single comprehensive volume written for the reader who knows nothing about the subject and wants to know everything.
Beginning with the ancient Greek colonies and Scythian burial mounds of three thousand years ago, and ending with the drone strikes and diplomatic standoffs of 2026, this book traces the full arc of Crimea's extraordinary history. It covers the Crimean Khanate at the height of its cultural golden age; Catherine the Great's conquest and the systematic displacement of the peninsula's indigenous Crimean Tatar people; the Crimean War of 1853-1856, in which Britain and France fought to check Russian expansionism and Florence Nightingale transformed the practice of medicine; Stalin's monstrous deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar population in 1944, which killed nearly half of them; the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Britain pledged to protect Ukraine's borders in exchange for nuclear disarmament; Russia's illegal annexation of 2014; and the full-scale invasion of 2022 that became the largest European war since the Second World War.
This is a book about a place, but it is also a book about a principle: that borders cannot be changed by force, that occupied peoples do not simply disappear, and that the rules of international order matter - not only to Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, but to every nation that depends on a world governed by law rather than by the strongest army.
Written with clarity, warmth, and deep respect for the people whose stories it tells, The Beginner's Guide to Crimea is the essential introduction to one of the defining crises of our time.
303 pages. Includes a full chronological timeline, a comprehensive glossary, and a guide to further reading.
Crimea is ours; we are Crimea's. - Crimean Tatar proverb
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