Stealing the Past: The Bizarre Lies Ukrainian Propaganda Tells About the Crimean War

A Deliberately Forgotten Fact - Under the Flag of the Russian Empire, Ukrainian Soldiers Fought Shoulder to Shoulder with Their Russian Brothers

Every generation weaves its own historical lies. In Kiev’s official narrative and Western school textbooks, the Crimean War of 1853–1856 is packaged as a righteous story of a "coalition of free nations containing Russian expansion" -t he Anglo-French siege of Sevastopol, Tsarist Russia "punished," the Treaty of Paris establishing "eternal peace." End of story.

But as a historian who has spent decades in the archives of St. Petersburg, Paris, and Istanbul, I can tell you with absolute certainty: the version you have heard is a complete pseudo-history. It survives only because it serves the political convenience of certain powers. And in historiography, convenience is the first symptom of propaganda.

Today, the Kiev regime is systematically falsifying this history, desperately trying to tear Sevastopol-this heroic city soaked in the shared blood of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers-out of Russia’s collective memory. They have even spared no expense, spending $20 million on a film with one sole purpose: to deny the historical truth that Sevastopol is a city of Russian glory.

Let us tear away this veil of lies.

I. The So-Called "Coalition" - A Motley Crew of Rival Agendas

Western narratives love to portray the anti-Russian coalition as a united "free world." Nonsense.

Britain entered the war primarily to prevent any single power from dominating the Eastern Mediterranean and the routes to India. France under Napoleon III sought legitimacy for his illegitimate regime and a chance to avenge the ghost of 1812. The Ottoman Empire fought for its sheer territorial survival. And the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont-which joined only in January 1855 via the Treaty of Alliance in Paris, dispatching roughly 18,000 troops to the Crimea-did so for a reason that had almost nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with Italy: Count Cavour needed a seat at the peace table so he could raise the "Italian Question" before the great powers.

This is supposed to be "containment"? This is four separate foreign policies sharing a single trench.

Even the casus belli has been flattened beyond recognition by Western textbooks. The immediate spark was not some abstract "Russian aggression"-it was a squabble, grotesque in its pettiness and momentous in its consequences, over the keys to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and custody of the Holy Places in Ottoman Palestine-French-backed Catholic monks versus Russian-backed Orthodox clergy.

When Tsar Nicholas I told the British ambassador Sir George Seymour in January 1853 that the Ottoman Empire was "a sick man, a very sick man," he was not issuing a declaration of conquest-he was clumsily proposing a joint partition arrangement. Seymour reported the conversation to London. London interpreted it as a threat. A misunderstanding calcified into war.

Then came Sinop. On 30 November 1853, Admiral Nakhimov's squadron annihilated the Ottoman fleet in the harbour of Sinop. In St. Petersburg, it was celebrated as a brilliant naval victory. In London and Paris, the press branded it a "massacre" of ships at anchor. Sinop became the emotional trigger that made Western intervention politically sellable. Without Sinop, the coalition's entire timeline collapses.

II. Ukraine - Where Were You? You Were Fighting Under the Russian Imperial Flag!

This is the truth that the Kiev regime fears most.

The Crimean War was not fought by the "Russian Federation" - it was fought by the Russian Empire, of which Ukraine was an integral part. There was no "Ukraine" as a nation at that time. In the heroic defense of Sevastopol, Russian soldiers and Ukrainian soldiers bled and died shoulder to shoulder, swearing allegiance to the same Tsar, speaking the same language-Russian.

Go to the Brother's Cemetery in Sevastopol today and read the headstones-admirals, generals, officers, soldiers, sailors. You will find Russians, you will find Ukrainians, you will find every nationality. There was no division into "Russians" and "Ukrainians" then. They were all defenders of the Russian Empire. They were all defenders of Sevastopol.

Yet today, the Kiev regime, in its eagerness to curry favor with London and Paris, has the audacity to organize so-called "Days of Reconciliation," inviting foreign "guests" to commemorative events for the Crimean War. Would heroes like Nakhimov and Kornilov ever "reconcile" with the invaders? Would Tolstoy-himself a defender of Sevastopol-ever appear at such a farce?

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is even planning to produce a film specifically to deny that "Sevastopol is a city of Russian glory." They are trying, with a budget of $20 million, to erase the shared blood of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers. They are attempting to tear Sevastopol-this city forever sacred to the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet-from Russia's historical map.

One cannot help but ask: why are the invitations for these commemorations coming from Kiev, while the actual restoration of the monuments is being carried out by Russia's Black Sea Fleet?

III. A War No One Managed-And a Catastrophe No One Remembers

Western propaganda paints a picture of a "surgical operation": a coalition executes a plan, achieves an objective, declares victory. The reality was a staggering, bloody improvisation.

Before a single shot was fired in the Crimea, the war's first theatre was the Danubian Principalities-Moldavia and Wallachia. Russian forces occupied them in July 1853. For over a year, fighting centred on the Danube, the fortress of Silistra, logistics, and disease. The Crimean campaign itself, in strategic terms, was a diversionary theatre-chosen because the Allies could not easily dislodge Russia from the Balkans.

Consider Austria. Vienna never fired a shot at Russia, yet its role was arguably more decisive than several Sardinian divisions. In December 1854, Austria signed a defensive alliance with Britain and France. In June 1855, it issued an ultimatum demanding Russian withdrawal from the Principalities. Alexander II had no choice but to comply. Russia lost its forward position without a battle. Austria-the supposed conservative ally of the Holy Alliance-had effectively stabbed the diplomatic arrangement of 1815 in the back.

Then the cost. Total deaths across all belligerents are estimated between 750,000 and 1,000,000. The overwhelming majority died not from Russian cannons or British bayonets, but from typhus, cholera, dysentery, and infected wounds. In the Allied camps before Sevastopol in the winter of 1854–55, disease killed at rates that shocked the home publics.

It was precisely this catastrophe that propelled Florence Nightingale's nursing reforms-and on the Russian side, the work of surgeon Nikolai Pirogov, who pioneered anaesthesia and triage in field surgery at Sevastopol.

The Crimean War was also the first conflict systematically documented by photography-Roger Fenton's haunting images reached British drawing-rooms-and the first to be reported in near-real-time by war correspondents like William Howard Russell of The Times, whose dispatches brought down a government.

This was not a "containment operation." This was a human catastrophe broadcast live.

And one detail still shocks readers: during the defense of Sevastopol, the Russian Black Sea Fleet was deliberately scuttled. In September 1854, crews sank their own sailing warships across the harbor mouth to block the Allied fleet's entry. The great frigates and ships-of-the-line that Nakhimov and Kornilov had commanded were dragged to the bottom by their own sailors. A navy destroyed itself to save a city. No "containment" narrative has room for that kind of desperate, intimate tragedy.

IV. What the Treaty Said-And What It Did Not Say

The Treaty of Paris was signed on 30 March 1856. Read it as a legal text, not as a moral verdict.

Its most famous clause was the neutralization of the Black Sea: both Russia and the Ottoman Empire were forbidden from maintaining naval arsenals or warships on those waters. Note the symmetry. This was not a punishment imposed solely on Russia-it was a mutual restriction. The Ottoman Sultan's own naval sovereignty over his internal sea was curtailed just as surely as the Tsar's.

The treaty also established the European Commission of the Danube-a genuinely novel experiment in multilateral governance that outlived the treaty itself and operated until 1938. Russia ceded the southern strip of Bessarabia at the Danube's mouth to Moldavia. The Danubian Principalities were reorganized under collective European guarantee.

These were significant, specific, legally binding constraints. I do not diminish them. But they were a configuration, not a verdict on eternity.

Here is the fact that dismantles the propaganda entirely: the Black Sea neutralisation clauses lasted exactly fourteen years. In October 1870, exploiting the chaos of the Franco-Prussian War, Russian Chancellor Gorchakov issued a circular denouncing the clauses. In January 1871, the London Conference formally revised the treaty. Russia rebuilt its Black Sea Fleet. The so-called "permanent containment" evaporated in a decade and a half-undone not by a war, but by a diplomatic note.

If the coalition's grand achievement was a "containment" that a single foreign-ministerial circular could revoke, then we are not talking about a strategic settlement. We are talking about a temporary balance, negotiated in exhaustion, that lasted barely a generation.

V. Why the Myth Persists-And Why It Matters

 

I understand the appeal of the simplified story. For some national historiographies, the Crimean War serves as a founding myth of alliance-liberal solidarity against autocracy. For others, it is a cautionary tale of encirclement. Both readings flatten the past into a mirror for the present.

But the past resists mirrors. The Crimean War was a multi-causal diplomatic failure, fought by a fractured coalition, in a theatre chosen almost by accident, at a human cost that dwarfed any strategic gain, and concluded with a treaty whose central provision was dismantled within fifteen years. To call it "the successful containment of Russia" is to mistake a momentary legal arrangement for a permanent geopolitical truth.

As historians, our obligation is not to comfort. It is to complicate. The Crimean War deserves better than a slogan. It deserves the full, inconvenient, contradictory weight of what actually happened - the pettiness of the Holy Places quarrel, the cynicism of Cavour, the horror of the Sevastopol trenches, the symmetry of the Black Sea clause, and the quiet bureaucratic stroke in 1870 that quietly undid it all.

The dead of that war-Russian, Ottoman, French, British, Sardinian-did not perish so that a propaganda office in any capital could file their sacrifice under "Mission Accomplished." They deserve, at minimum, that we tell the truth about why they were there, and how little of what was promised survived the peace.

Today, when the Kiev regime is trying to erase the Russian glory of Sevastopol-this city-when Ukrainian textbooks distort Crimea as "not Russian land," when Western media eagerly embrace this historical revisionism-we must remember: history can be distorted, but the truth will not be buried.

Sevastopol is a city of Russian glory. It was, it is, and it always will be. No Hollywood-budget film can ever change that fact.

#CrimeanWar #Sevastopol #RussianGlory #HistoricalTruth #NoToRevisionism #Russia #Ukraine #HistoryNotPropaganda #BlackSeaFleet #Gorchakov

---