The Crimean Nexus: Putin's War and the Clash of Civilizations

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Not everyone can find the Crimean peninsula on a map, but once you do, its shape, like that of Italy, is hard to forget. Variously compared to a leaf, a stingray, a pendant, and an eagle, it barely touches on the continent, protruding with almost perfect geometrical precision into the center of the Black Sea.

The thin stem making Crimea not an island is called Perekop Isthmus. The Black Sea squeezes it from the west, and Sivash, a bay of the Sea of Azov, from the east. Sivash is not really a bay but rather a shape-shifting conglomerate of lakes, islets, and shoals about forty miles wide whose silt, salt, and mud contours have changed numerous times within human memory.

The road to Kiev runs through Perekop, a bottleneck only four miles wide—roughly the distance between Fourteenth and Ninety-sixth streets in Manhattan. The other dry-land connection to the mainland is a short man-made bridge across the Sivash; that road takes you to Moscow. Close the two connections, and Crimea would effectively become an island.

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