“Now, just imagine that the Crimea is yours ... Believe me, you will acquire immortal fame such as no other sovereign of Russia ever had. This glory will open the way to still further and greater glory ...”—Memorandum from Grigory Potemkin to Catherine the Great, urging Crimean annexation, 1780.

The first time Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, under the expansionist regime of Catherine the Great in 1783, Russia stood ascendant. Pushing west, south, and east simultaneously, covering steppe and coastline alike, imperial Russia swallowed territory at will. At the time, Crimea was but another jewel in the empress's crown. Claiming it fortified Black Sea security, chipped at the Ottoman Empire’s former territories, and guaranteed, as adviser-and-lover Grigory Potemkin told Catherine, “the security of the population of Novorossiya”—the Ukrainian territory whose deep Russian roots separatists claim legitimizes Russia's current incursion into eastern Ukraine.

In 1853, Catherine's treasure fell into chaos. French and British and Turkish troops swarmed the peninsula, seeking to check Russian expansion and to control the Black Sea. The Crimean War begat Leo Tolstoy and Florence Nightingale, balaclavas and war photography. But the war, in and of itself, was largely specious, a brew of confused imperialist motivations and bruised egos. Hundreds of thousands died, but little else changed. Russia held Crimea.

It was a century later that Moscow forfeited the peninsula. On February 27, 1954, a small notification on the front of the Soviet mouthpiece Pravda conceded what British and French troops had failed to take: Russia was giving up Crimea. One sentence, eight lines, beside a sprawling article about International Women’s Day—this was all Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev required to hand Crimea to Ukraine. It was a gesture to celebrate Slavic fraternity between Moscow and Kiev, and besides, between fellow Soviet republics it formally amounted to bureaucratic relabeling.

Sixty years later, with the Soviet Union now dissolved, Russia reneged. The move came last spring, as Ukraine’s second successful revolution in a decade peaked, and protesters seeking to bring Ukraine closer to the European Union ousted an autocrat cozy with Moscow. Pro-Russian protests broke out along the peninsula, and crisply professional men with guns and unmarked uniforms began popping up in key locations. “Little green men,” some Crimeans called them. “Polite people,” the Russian defense minister joked. Whatever the title, they all made sure the Soviet-era gift was returned to Russia.

The annexation of Crimea snuffed Slavic fraternity. Europe saw its first forced-border change in decades. A year ago today, Russia announced that Ukraine’s ousted autocrat had officially asked for Moscow’s troops in Ukraine. Twelve months on, the Kremlin has by all accounts gotten away with the biggest territory heist the continent has seen since World War II.