Excerpt:

Mikulas Fabry, an associate professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology, says the sanctions on Russia that followed are still causing headaches.

“No foreign ship can dock at Crimean ports. No foreign airline can fly into a Crimean airport. The Russian passports that are issued in Crimea are not recognized by the outside world.”

Decades from now, Fabry thinks Crimea could revert back to Ukrainian control, citing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as an example.

Occupied for a half-century by the Soviet Union, most western countries never recognized the occupation and continued to receive exiled Baltic diplomats until independence in the early 1990’s.

He also draws inspiration from Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, where unyielding sanctions have convinced the population they’ll never earn outside recognition and should instead reunify with the rest of the island.

“I think something like that may well happen in Crimea and Russia more broadly.”

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The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs is a unit of Georgia Tech's Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.